


Leading the Way

by nogoaway



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Anal Sex, Closeted Character, Coming Out, Don’t copy to another site, First Time, M/M, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-05 18:15:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 27,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18834079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: In which Nate, being an officer at heart, takes approximately 25 years to find his own dick with a map.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is fanfiction about a TV show, not real people. No disrespect is intended.  
> 2\. Innumerable thanks to [SoloChaos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloChaos/profile) who took a look at an early draft of this and identified many structural problems (and also moto'd me into shape with her delightful commentary!). Without her I would have abandoned this fic. Any and all "creative" uses of punctuation are my own.  
> 3\. "Gunny whacking Nate with a newspaper" is the brainchild of the inimitable [streetsuss_serenade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/streetsuss_serenade/profile), and I stole it from a conversation we had in confidence. Mea culpa, Elizabeth. I hope all this repressed!Nate makes up for it.

_July, 1988. Anne Arundel, Maryland_

Nate left pale footprints of sandy, sticky mud as he clambered up onto the pier, worn wood soft under his bare knees. The sun reflecting off the green water of Clement's Creek was hot enough to sear skin, but he was caked in mud from his shorts to his toes, and slathered in sunscreen above that.

“I'm going to catch a crab,” he informed his grandfather, who was running a scraper along the front of the little boat that Nate had practically lived on in past summers, _The Plover_ , “a big one.”

His grandfather didn't look up, taking another blade's-worth of algae, grasses, and slime off the white hull, sending the mass drifting out to stick against the soggy wooden pile of the pier. “Don't talk about it, Nathaniel, just do it.”

This struck Nate as very wise, although everything his grandfather told him was wise, even the correct way to eat potato chips, and to always cross himself before getting into a boat, and to assume a firearm was loaded, even if it was the bolt-action No. 4 Enfield rifle that lived above the roll-top desk and hadn't been fired since 1943. He stopped talking and dug around in his lunch pail and the slate-gray tackle-box that followed him everywhere when he visited his grandparents, threading bits of hot dog on a coil of monofilament fishing line. Then he reeled his arm back like Mike Cuellar and let it arc out over the water, passing over the quivering reflections of red rocks and tulip trees and his own body leaning out off the pier, long skinny arms and legs.

He trolled the line back in slowly, winding it around his flat palm. Cast it out again. It was a cicada summer. They trilled in the trees like a thousand refrigerators running. A dragonfly zipped along the surface of the water, bumped dumbly into his bare foot where it dangled.

“There's too much talking in the world,” his grandfather said to the creek, scrape scrape scraping away in the heat, “and not enough virtue.”

Nate turned his wrist and felt a slight tug, a little pinch that pulled the fishing line tight around his index finger. He drew it in slowly, heart pounding with excitement, watching the water where the line vanished for the breaching blue-green armor of a crab. Tension bleached his strangled fingers white as he pulled against increasing resistance, arm over arm.

The line gave, nearly toppling him over. A wet thatch of river grass landed beside him on the pier, tangled like knotted hair around a cluster of barnacles and clinging hungrily to the line.

He breathed heavily, wanting to cry but knowing he wouldn't. The sound of two heavy gloves hitting the slats startled him.

“Here,” his grandfather said, holding Nate's quivering fist in his bigger one, winding the line once more around his soft hand. “You're hitting the rocks. You have to aim higher.”

 

* * *

 

_May, 1995. Baltimore, Maryland_

His mother's Honda was still in the driveway when he returned from his run, which was so unusual that Nate checked the oven clock and the wall clock in the kitchen when he got inside, just to make sure that he hadn't suddenly become much faster. But it was nearly 7:30, and she hadn't left for work yet.

He could hear the television hiccuping between channels in the sitting room, and stuck his head in. She was flipping between CNN and Fox, which both appeared to be reporting on the same incident.

“-- _Iowa in mourning today after the brutal murder of a twenty-one year old-_ -”

“-- _died minutes after reaching the hospital from injuries sustained in a_ \--”

Nate lingered in the door, still breathing hard. Sweat was drying on his skin beneath his clothes, raising chills along his arms and neck in the air conditioning.

“Hey,” he said, and his mother craned her head around over the couch, “you're going to be late.”

“-- _beaten with a tire iron and then doused in gasoline, and set on fire. Two adult males were arrested in connection with the crime, which locals believe was motivated by the victim's sexual orientation_ \--”

“My morning meeting was canceled,” she said, waving one hand vaguely at the television. “I can't believe this. It's so horrible.”

“-- _college junior majoring in psychology was visiting his family over spring break when tragedy struck--_ ”

Nate stared at the head shot of the dead man, who was slightly older than him, had blond hair as long as his ears, and was wearing a green Henley. He was smiling in the photograph. Not anymore, presumably. It was sad, but it didn't seem worthy of national news. Thousands of people were dying in Bosnia, among them American peace-keepers.

“Yeah. I'm gonna take a shower,” he said. “Are you still coming to Awards Day?”

Awards Day was like Gilman's graduation before the graduation, because most of the honors went to seniors. He was receiving the Peter H. Dunwich student leadership award as well as an athletics medallion. Of course, all of these things were announced far too late to have any influence on his college admissions chances. It didn't really matter. He was satisfied with Dartmouth. He would have been okay with any of his choices, because he intended to apply himself.

“Of course.” She flipped back to Fox again, where a pair of talking heads were discussing hate crimes legislation while a pan of the crime scene, a roadside ditch looking unremarkable in daylight, played on behind them. “I'll be there by four.”

“I appreciate it,” Nate said, because he did. “It means a lot.”

“Of course.”

He was stripping out of his shirt and halfway up the stairs when he heard her say, softly, “God. His poor mother.”

Despite himself it followed him, that television. He thought about it as he shaved and dressed and drove himself to campus, and handed in his essay on tone and metaphor in _Good-bye To All That_ to Ms. Howell, and stood on stage in the Fitzgerald Theatre to shake the hand of the dean. He smiled and nodded and talked about Dartmouth with his parents and Greg's parents out on the quad afterward, and all the while he was thinking about that roadside ditch. Two men with a crowbar at night. What would he do?

He thought about it at home in his bed in the dark, arm tucked behind his head, generating scenarios. What if they came from the side? He could still run. They'd have to surprise him, hit him so hard over the head he was stunned. How could they know he was a faggot in the dark? Maybe they knew him. Maybe he came onto one of them. But who did that while stopped on a roadside? And what if one hid in the car? You could take them one at a time.

He was still alive when they lit him on fire. He sat there and did nothing while they poured gasoline on him. Maybe he begged.

He felt nothing charitable towards the man. He turned it over and over in his mind for days, and the only conclusion he came to was that he would never be that weak.

 

* * *

 

_November, 1998. Hanover, New Hampshire_

The building locked at eight pm, but the light was on under Dr. Preston's door, so Nate knocked. A moment later he was greeted by his bespectacled Greek Poetry professor, who was barefoot and bereft of necktie.

“Oh, Nate.” Dr. Preston stood back to let him in, returned to his over-burdened desk, and began rifling beneath mountains of papers to retrieve the ragged little hardback they'd been working through. “I must have gotten confused; I thought you canceled this week. I'm not prepared.”

“I did,” Nate said. “I'm sorry. I was unexpectedly free. I can go if you're busy.”

Dr. Preston (“Please call me Drew, Mr. Fick”) scoffed and gestured at Nate's usual seat, a green armchair situated under the same floor lamp that covered the desk. Sometimes when he was in that chair, Nate would hear a noise in the hallway and would worry that the door was about to open, and he'd think he should push the chair back so there was more room between him and Drew. But it was dim in the office and it made perfect sense to sit there while working together, and no one was going to think twice about it even if they did see. “Sit down, sit down. I owe you some Pindar; you've rescued me from letters of recommendation.”

“Most normal people would call Pindar the worser fate,” Nate said, and sat. Drew gave him a conspiratorial wink that made the blood in his hands tingle.

No one ever came into the office, anyway.

“You were 'unexpectedly free'?” Drew asked, as he paged through the anthology. He always selected reading assignments seemingly at random, whatever 'spoke to him' at the moment. This often meant only the most convoluted and extensive of odes.

“I was at a party,” Nate admitted.

“Not a good one, I take it.”

“This is more useful,” Nate said, and then, because it was dark and quiet and he'd had several beers, he said, “I think I'm joining the Marines. No, I know I am.”

Drew paused, and closed the book on his index finger, holding his place. “That's quite a decision. But why are you telling me? I'm not your advisor.”

“I just told my girlfriend,” Nate said. “And she dumped me. So I came here.”

Drew set the anthology down fully and rubbed at his eyes behind his glasses. “I'm going to break the law now,” he announced, and opened the bottom-most drawer of the desk, which clinked. He withdrew a bottle of something amber and expensive, and two shot glasses, one on either finger. “I am offering you this of my own free will, on the altar of our friendship, and with the understanding that there is not a single twenty-year-old on this campus who is not partaking on a Friday evening.”

Nate snorted. “I'm not going to report you.”

“Excellent.” Drew cracked the seal on the bottle and the scent of bourbon hit Nate hard between the eyes. “I have never been able to do breakups without adequate lubrication.”

“I'm not sad,” Nate said, accepting the glass he was offered and sipping at it, feeling warm all over. “I'm relieved.”

Drew sat back in his chair and downed his own shot, watching Nate intently. He said nothing.

“She's always complaining about how serious I am. It's frustrating.”

“You're a different breed, Nate,” Drew rested the empty glass on his breastbone. “But the Marines? Half the department is pulling to keep you here for graduate school, and the other half is dead set on sending you to Oxford. This will surprise a lot of people.”

Nate flushed. “I didn't realize you talked about us.”

“Of course we talk about you. The field is withering. You young scholars are our rage against the dying of the light.” Drew nodded at him, like he was tipping his hat. “And, selfishly, I want more traditionalists among the fresh blood. I'm tired of wading through shitty, politically-motivated postmodern scholarship that is interested primarily in disparaging the canon and the history of Western thought.”

“You're not supposed to admit that,” Nate laughed. He knew Drew hated what he had once referred to as 'the new regime'; it was never exactly clear to Nate what this regime was, but it involved feminists and post-colonialists. They read exactly one 'new regime' article per topical unit and in discussing each one of them Drew had given Nate dry looks across the room as he tried valiantly to provoke any commentary at all from the rest of the class. Was Athens better or worse than modern imperialist states? Did Sophocles mean for Antigone, and not the king, to be the hero of the play? Did slaves contribute significantly to the design of the Parthenon? It was obvious to Nate that Drew found these to be unspeakably idiotic questions. It always felt good to be the sole recipient of that sarcastic glance, like he was in on a secret.

Drew made a show of pouring himself another shot, and gestured for Nate to finish his own. Nate did, and took his refill. “I cannot tell a lie, Mr. Fick. I am dreadfully biased in favor of civilization. I believe that there is a Good, a True, and a Beautiful, and that there is more to being human than self-interested survival drive. I think you do as well. So you must have quite a reason.”

“My great-grandfather was killed at Amiens in 1918.” Nate sipped. “He was nineteen. I'm sick of reading and talking about bravery and honor like I've ever been tested that way. I need to do something real. It's like I haven't lived.”

“My god, you are the archetype,” Drew murmured, and reached out to brush the back of his hand against Nate's cheek.

Nate's entire body shuddered. Bourbon sloshed onto his hand. He set the glass down and wiped it against his khakis. “What--”

“I'm sorry,” Drew groaned, bowing his head. “I'm a terrible cliché.” He laughed. “You know, I requested not to be your advisor.”

“You're married,” Nate said, still shaking. _And twice my age._ It was like time had stopped. He couldn't decide if he was scared or not. His dick certainly had no complaints. But his stomach was turning in on and over itself; he was flooded with adrenaline.

“I'm weak. Jesus, Nate. You must know how beautiful you are."

Beautiful. Not brave, or honest, or smart. He'd been acing Dr. Preston's classes since sophomore year. It was his easy A. Not like O-chem, or statistics, or any of his other advanced Greek classes. He felt sick with the kind of overwhelming dread he remembered only faintly from childhood, when he'd broken a rule and was waiting for his parents to come home and find out about it.

“I can't help it,” Drew whispered, morose, and in that moment, Nate _hated_ him.

 _Make a fucking decision_ , he told himself.

He stood up and walked out of the office in staggering silence, still hard, want and fury pounding behind his eyes.

\-----

He woke, as always, exactly three minutes before his alarm was set to go off. Opening his eyes hurt. He had the distinctly unbearable hangover he always got from mixing alcohol, but worse than usual, because he'd gone to bed without eating anything or drinking any water and he had a faint, dreamlike memory of crying silently into his pillow.

It was that thought which got him up. He brushed his teeth and drank the last inch of yesterday's coffee from the pot, cold. He decided that it was day one, weekend or not. OCS required three miles in under twenty-four minutes. Nate could do that with the flu. _Aim higher_.

He pulled on his heaviest hiking boots from the back of his closet, and the biggest hardbacks he could find from around the dorm. _Ancient Civilization: A Sourcebook_. _Principles and Mechanisms of Organic Chemistry_. _The Landmark Thucydides_. He slammed his thumbnail between an annotated Bible and _Guns, Germs and Steel_ in his haste to stuff them into his bag. He jammed _The Lewis and Short Latin-English Lexicon_ against _Calculus_ until the dust cover tore. The bag bulged. He could get bricks, he thought. Cinderblocks.

He picked up his childhood copy of _The Guns of August_ from the shelf above his desk, stood there for a heartbeat staring at it, and then put it back down.

The quad was empty at six am on Saturday. He ran from his dorm to the chapel on the hill, then around the soccer field twice, then figure-eighted his way along his usual 5k loop. His back and chest were chafing from the jostling of the bag, but he still had the headache and he wasn't short of breath. There weren't enough hills. _Aim fucking higher, Nathaniel_.

The library had twelve floors accessed by a single stairwell. He climbed at a jog, two steps at a time. When he reached the top, he took the elevator down and started all over again.

 

* * *

 

_S_ _eptember, 1999. Quantico, Virginia  
_

Eight weeks into the longest ten weeks of his life, Nate felt the log he had balanced on his left shoulder shift down in the back, felt the rhythm they were using to cut their way through the mud falter.

He knew before he heard Sloane fall what had happened. Two hundred and sixty pounds bore down on him, forcing his knees into the muck. The stock of his rifle hit a protruding root and pulled the strap tight around his neck, choking him off. He got his feet under him and braced himself, holding there as well as he could without slipping. Ahead of him, Copeland had also stopped, arms straining around the front of the log to keep them from tipping over. Nate could see his chest heaving under his load bearing vest.

“Sloane,” he gritted. Stokes, Lamb, and Castaneda powered by them on the right, steps in sync like a team of rowers pulling. “Get up.”

“I'm done,” Sloane gasped. “I can't.”

“Yes you fucking can.”

“Nate,” said Copeland, and the tone of his voice was like watching dominoes falling, and Nate wasn't going to let it happen on his watch, Sloane breaking off in mud up to his ribs and Copeland following suit because exhaustion was fucking contagious. They had to move. Everything seemed impossible from a standstill. They were sinking in morale more than mud.

He hunched down and curled over to get the weight of the log across his upper back and shimmied towards Sloane in the mud, feeling thumb-sized splinters tear the collar of his PT shirt and stick in the fabric of his vest. Something sharp scraped the back of his neck, abrading skin. He ignored it, groping backward with his free hand until he hit Sloane, grabbed him by the webbing and _heaved_.

“It's my legs,” Sloane gasped, not helping him in the least, and if Nate weren't holding up the end of an oak tree with one hand (visibly bleeding), his neck (probably also bleeding), and hopes and dreams, he thought, he would give serious consideration to shooting Sloane in the face. Sloane had been nursing shin splints for weeks because he hadn't done enough cardio conditioning, expecting his pull-up score to carry him through a course that was about mental and physical endurance.

Nate shut himself down. His personal feelings were not helpful here.

“Come on, Nate,” said Copeland, whose arms were shaking. “We're fucked anyway. We won't make it.”

They had eight minutes from the range to the rope climb. This log carry should have taken six of them at most. He didn't bother wiping the mud off the face of his watch. After weeks of running, and running, and more running, he was so in tune with counting his own heart rate under various degrees of physical exertion that he experienced the world in twenty-second intervals. Copeland was right, they were out of the race. It made no difference. Their job was to get the log through the mud. Their job was to become people _capable_ of getting logs through mud.

Nate crouched down beside Sloane in the muck, letting the weight crush him until they were at eye-level, two underfed, sleep-deprived, exhausted individuals on the verge of breaking. Nate had forgotten what it was like not to feel like this. “You either carry, or you walk next to us to the rope climb while we do. Either way, Marine, you walk.” He held his hand out.

Sloane took it. This time when Nate heaved, he got his legs under him.

“Left,” Nate shouted, and Copeland stepped left, and, “right,” and they staggered upright and forward, Nate still pulling Sloane by the webbing, still bearing up nearly half the weight.

Sergeant Instructor Siegel at the rope climb reamed them out, disqualified them, and called Nate a simple-minded, limp-wristed, jelly-kneed fairy cunt for dropping his rifle in the dirt like he thought he was a kid at recess playing at toy soldiers. Nate stood at attention with mud drying on his chin and took it. It didn't feel especially vicious. The invective was completely impersonal, but there was something in Siegel's eyes that was paying very close attention to him. Nate dared to imagine that it was approval.

 

* * *

 

_February, 2003. Oceanside, California_

He knew he was in deep shit when he dragged himself out of yet another pointless meeting with Captain Schwetje and Sergeant Griego, the third one that week, in which his faith in their command structure was being attrited faster than a Popsicle melting on a sidewalk, and it was raining, and his mother had called him the night before and cried on the phone about his deployment, and PFC Christeson had come to muster hungover and Nate had had to life him out in front of everyone, and he was _still_ excited as fuck to be slogging his way to the range to lie down flat in the mud, because Colbert was going to be there.

“I'm going to see Brad at 1100,” he'd thought to himself, as Sergeant Griego had launched into yet another endless excuse about why the supply situation looked like creamed chipped shit on toast and would never be worked out before they stepped off, it wasn't his fault, etc.

As if he had any right to such familiarity with the man, even only in his own head. “I'm going to see Brad.” As if brightening Nate's day were the reason Colbert was going to be at the range, and not honing his marksmanship and building trust with his team before shipping out to a war zone. Pathetic.

“Lovely day for it, sir,” Colbert said, just loud enough to be heard over the rain sheeting down onto their kevlar, the hood of the safety vehicle, and the steel bleachers ten yards away that the rest of Nate's Marines were huddled under. Someone had spread two all-weather coats out over the stands in an attempt to provide shelter, and Nate could make out most of teams one and two piled like puppies in the meager cover. “We'll be well-prepared for the 8 millimeters of precipitation Kuwait receives annually.”

“Sergeant,” Nate said, struggling to sign the remains of what had once been a waiver from Range Operations Division but was now a pulpy white mess smeared across a swollen clipboard. “As we all know, it never rains on the range, so there is no excuse for complaining.” His felt tip pen tore through the paper.

Colbert straightened up instantly, and Nate bit his own lip. He hadn't meant it to come off as a reprimand. Colbert wasn't who he was frustrated with. The man had just been trying to make conversation, and, knowing Colbert, subtly remind Nate that his platoon had been sitting in the inclement weather for two hours waiting for the officers to arrive, a fact of which Nate was well aware but could do nothing about. Now they were stalled until Dave, the designated RSO, deigned to show up.

“Besides,” he continued, giving up on the clipboard and tucking the pen back into his flak, “that's a yearly average. Unless we're still there in December, which is unlikely, I doubt we'll see any moisture besides our own sweat.”

“An optimistic timetable, sir,” Colbert said, and relaxed visibly with a coy flash of teeth. “'We'll be home by Christmas'? That didn't go so smoothly in 1914.”

Nate stared at him, trying to remember if he'd ever indicated to Colbert that he was well-versed (perhaps obsessively) in the First World War. But of course he hadn't-- it was perfectly reasonable for Colbert to have an interest in military history and to assume that Nate was reasonably familiar with the subject.

“Did you have family in the Great War, Sergeant?”

“Wouldn't know, sir. I'm adopted.” Colbert stared out at the terrain, almost longingly. “Sir, may I make a suggestion?”

“Please do.”

“You're Range Safety Certified, sir. You could petition the OIC for Captain McGraw's role, and we could get moving.”

He had already asked. “Captain Schwetje is OIC,” Nate informed him.

“Ah. Say no more, sir,” Colbert said, crossing his arms and settling in. “We'll just enjoy this vista together, then.”

 

* * *

 

_April, 2003. Iraq_

“That man,” Brad said, as Captain Schwetje departed from the cammie net he was crouching under, “belongs in a museum or a laboratory.” He rattled the Bic razor he was using in the tiny amount of water he'd decanted into the empty lid of a dip can, cleaning out the blades.

“Sergeant,” Nate warned, and prepared to make himself scarce before he heard anything he was obligated to respond to in a disciplinary capacity. Damn Brad anyway; he didn't feel like getting up. It was nice to be in the shade, and the soft, precise noises of Brad going about his toilette were comforting in a way that Nate wasn't interested in examining. Mostly his feet hurt and he was tired, and the less he wandered around the camp the less likely he was to encounter Griego.

“He's a flawless, textbook example of the Dunning-Kruger effect,” Brad continued, shaving a clean stripe through the dust on his jaw. “It's almost poetic. A scientific marvel.”

It was classic Brad-- a reference too obscure and carefully presented for Nate to call him on it. Insubordination that would look ridiculous written up, and so would go unacknowledged. Something he knew Nate would understand, but no one else. Talking in code like a political prisoner knowing his mail would be read, keeping his words just banal or arcane enough to avoid suspicion. It was artistry, really.

Nate sighed and heaved himself to his feet, feeling about ninety years old. “Enough. Twenty-five percent watch tonight, Sergeant, unless you hear otherwise.”

Brad eyed him calmly, a smear of thinned, tacky shaving cream along his cheek. “You should sleep, sir.”

Nate ignored him and stepped out into the light like a gopher coming out of hiding. He hadn't taken three steps before Dave stumbled out from behind Alpha's lead vehicle and began pontificating on Vietnam.

\-----

The Dunning-Kruger effect was the proven, observable tendency of incompetent people to overestimate their own aptitude in the very areas they were inept in. After three years in the Marines and four before that in college, Nate had witnessed the phenomenon enough times to concede its validity.

After a week stewing in his own juices two vehicles behind Brad's, his eyes grainy with sleep deprivation and sand, the waffle-weave of the radio mouthpiece permanently imprinted on his cheek, he was convinced that there was a corollary: the more incompetent one's peers, there was a corresponding tendency to overestimate one's own aptitude.

Case in point: he had thought that he was keeping his personal feelings to himself. Next to Dave's cloud of fear sweat and paranoid ravings, for instance, he was a model of equanimity. Unlike Brad or Person or Poke, he had never once let slip a criticism or a complaint about Command's decision-making process or the Strategic Plan. Jacks' pornographic asides directed at anything even vaguely resembling the female form made Nate look like a Victorian gentleman. And compared to Griego's seething hatred of him, he was as polite and impassive as a marble statue at the bottom of a frozen lake.

These were the things he told himself, and he was, apparently, full of shit, because outside Baghdad, fifty yards from the slit-trench latrine that he had informed Sergeant Colbert of thirty-five mikes prior, he was pushed up against a palm tree in the dark and kissed.

Nate's kevlar was off, hanging from the front of his flak. It rolled between their chests until Brad pushed it away with an irritated noise that he dropped directly into Nate's mouth alongside his tongue. He tasted like peanut butter, tobacco, and sour, under-extracted coffee. Just the warmth, the solidity of him had Nate's head spinning. All the blood in his body rushed to his dick.

“Stop,” Nate said finally, and shoved him off. It took two tries. Brad's fingers were woven into the straps of his leg holster, Brad's own helmet knocking against his knee.

Brad stopped. In the moonlight, without the kevlar, his face seemed strange and delicate, gaunt. “Sir?”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Nate asked, trying to make it sound commanding, like he'd caught Brad doing any of the number of brain-dead things the men had done over the course of the invasion-- impromptu rodent fry-ups, spray-painting enemy headgear, saving dip spit in a Gatorade bottle and drawing straws for who would have to drink it.

Brad didn't dignify it with an answer. Instead he went still and said, very calmly, “Did I misunderstand?”

Nate's throat and chest seized. He felt dizzy. He should lie. He should _lie_. “I-- “ He owed Brad better than a lie. “No.” He swallowed and met Brad's eyes, refusing to be ashamed although his mind was racing, taking stock of every little interaction, every conversation, every look-- when had he given it away? How often had he failed to keep his shit wired tight? Who else knew? “But you understand why we can't.”

The fingers curled tighter in his holster, straps digging into his thigh. Then Brad let go and stepped back. His eyes darted to Nate's mouth. Nate realized that he was licking his lower lip nervously, and forced his face still.

“Roger copy,” Brad said, and left him there.

He didn't look disappointed walking away. He looked absolutely normal.


	2. Chapter 2

_July, 2003. Oceanside, California_

“Come to convince me to stay?” Nate asked when his office door completed removing Corporal Stafford and admitting his next contestant, which was, apparently, Brad Colbert. “I'll warn you-- prior visitors have only succeeded in giving me more reasons to separate.”

Brad grinned slyly at him. “I hear the new Chili & Macaroni is good. But no.”

Nate closed his eyes briefly. “Can I help you, Brad?” It was nine mikes into his 48 and he wanted to go home and work on his graduate school applications. He wasn't in the mood for the delicate balancing act that was maintaining an appropriate, professional distance from Brad Colbert, who had perfected his wit-powered magnetic field and took great pleasure in inflicting it on Nate.

“My apologies, but I've been dispatched to collect you for drinks, sir,” Brad said, not sounding apologetic at all. “I was told by Gunny Wynn himself that if you try to beg off, he'll find you and thwack you with the Times Sunday edition.”

“Mike doesn't read the Times,” Nate said, which only produced a smile with teeth. “I'm not out yet. It's still fraternization.”

Brad's expression softened. It was strange to watch from head-on. He was used to seeing it at a distance and in profile, Brad crouching down in front of a child or a dog or looking sideways at Ray Person asleep in the driver's seat or Walt cleaning his weapon on a crate. Fond and protective of the things and people he was most liable to express public disdain for. “The TLs want to see you off properly, sir. Call it an After Action.”

The sly bastard. Nate couldn't leverage yet another disappointment upon Espera and Reyes, and Brad knew it. “Fine. Lead the way.”

Brad extracted a key fob from his pocket and spun it around his index finger. A shell casing glinted on the ring. “Always do, Sir.”

Brad's bike, to Nate's surprise, was a sleek little European thing with a bare frame and a kick start that buzzed instead of roared. He thought, _it doesn't suit him_ , until Brad shrugged on a leather jacket over his PT shirt and vanished inside his smooth, black helmet. Suddenly he was a part of the bike, crouched and tense and dangerous. Nate started up his Audi and followed this strange chimera out of Pendleton and onto the 76, which made very little sense, but he'd asked Brad to lead, so off they went.

They crawled past farms and golf courses, Brad idling in traffic with his toes just brushing the asphalt, swaying along with the bike. At an unmarked exit he peeled off and Nate followed him, pulling up alongside the bike at the stop sign at the turnoff, and gave Brad what he hoped was a sufficiently unimpressed look.

Brad's head tilted just slightly (he managed to look smug even in the helmet) and led them down a quiet road into a network of cul-de-sacs bisected by a strip mall, a middle school, and a post office.

They entered a dark storefront with a sandwich board leaning against the window with 'Ziggy's' scrawled on it in green pastel. The place was leaking muffled mariachi music. When Brad opened the door Nate was hit by the overpowering smell of cigarette smoke.

“Poke lives up the road,” Brad explained, although Nate hadn't asked. “We drink here so he can stagger home to his family in time for bedtime stories.” And, Nate figured, it was far enough out of the way that they wouldn't encounter other jarheads. Brad rolled his helmet in his hands almost nervously as he scanned the room. One of the two men on bar waved at Brad, and he nodded back without looking directly at the guy.

Nate had the sudden and distinct impression that he was being let in on a secret. This was a special place for Brad, he realized. “I'll be on my best behavior,” he promised.

Brad gave him a strange look.

“I keep underestimating the Iceman,” Poke said in wry wonder when they turned a corner and encountered him and Reyes bent over a pool table on opposite ends. “I didn't think you'd actually come, dawg.”

“Hello, Captain.” Reyes saluted him coyly, a cube of blue chalk between his fingers. “Imagine seeing you here.”

“Poke. Rudy.” Nate nodded his hellos, unsure how casual to be. He had been invited, but he was in their territory.

“I'm very persuasive,” Brad put in, and set his helmet on a table. “It takes a truly skilled negotiator to sell an educated, self-respecting white man on spending time in your undignified presence, even with the promise of the best empanadas in Southern California.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Poke said mildly, and knocked a stripe cleanly into a corner pocket. “New guy pays.”

“Tony, that's not very hospitable.” Rudy smiled his supermodel smile. “We'll go Dutch.”

Nate owed these men a lot more than empanadas and beer. “Sergeant,” he said, straight-faced, “in all the duration of our acquaintance, that is the gayest thing I have ever heard you say.”

He could practically _feel_ Brad grinning over his shoulder, alight with that strange vibrating energy that passed between them sometimes when Nate consented to engaging with him honestly, putting aside the mask of rank for a moment. There were so many parts of him that knew better, but sometimes they were drowned out by the part that wanted to bathe in Brad's approval like a cat in a sunbeam. In Nate's defense, all of Bravo platoon wanted that. It was a rare honor.

He was down three beers and two games of pool when Poke asked, “So what's next, sir? You decamping to the East Coast?”

Nate nodded. “Graduate school. I'm thinking international relations, maybe policy. I'd like to do something more socially useful than just making money.”

Rudy nodded sagely across the table. “That's wise, brother. I hope you find what nourishes you.”

Brad snorted. If it were anyone else, Nate would have laughed too, but Rudy was so unfailingly earnest. “Thank you, Rudy.”

“Hippie shit aside, sir, if you're refusing to lead us through the fire the next time we get deployed? I expect you to be announcing the troop withdrawal from the Oval Office within the next five years.” Poke raised his glass slightly.

“You'd be out of a job,” Brad pointed out. “And he'd have to run as a Democrat.”

“Perish the thought,” Nate muttered, although there had been one or two “oh-dark-thirty, staring up at the ceiling, thinking up ten-year-plans” episodes where he'd considered it; not the Presidency, of course. Maryland State House, maybe. “I'd make a shitty politician.”

He knew he could do it, was the thing. But Iraq had killed something in him in a matter of weeks. He didn't want to imagine what he'd look like after a few years in politics, sorting out the same brutal math on a larger scale, from a cushy office, wearing a fake smile.

“We're all sad to see you go, sir,” Rudy said.

Poke excused himself long before he reached staggering, and Reyes followed soon after, citing a yoga class in the morning.

“I can never tell if he's joking,” Nate admitted, as the door closed behind him.

“About yoga?' Brad unscrewed a bottle of seltzer with a hiss. Nate should probably switch to water, too, if he wanted to get home in one piece. He was enjoying being irresponsible, though. “Sadly, no. He has us all downward dogging every other Tuesday morning at base. Seeing Manimal with his ass in the air took two years off of my lifespan.”

“Okay, getting to witness that?” Nate said, “Would be a reason to stay.”

Brad sipped at his water. The mariachi music had quieted into bluesy bossa nova. He'd stopped smelling the cigarette smoke a while ago, and now it was just pleasant and alive in the bar, a warm, active room filled with indistinct conversation occasionally punctuated by the snap of a pool cue. He had wondered why it felt so warm and calm in comparison to his usual haunts, and had realized, on his trip up to retrieve their second round, that it was because there was no television. Like Brad's bike, Ziggy's felt just a little bit old-fashioned, but not in a try-hard way. It was just a place that had been around for a while, had endured.

“I'm not sorry you're leaving,” Brad said, quietly.

Nate leaned in a little to hear him better. “Yeah? Why?”

Brad stared at him, intense in the usual way, like he was trying to beam full essays on his dissatisfaction with their tactical situation into Nate's brain via eye contact. “You know why.”

“I don't--,” Nate said, but Brad's boot slid between his under the table, big and solid. His calf was warm against Nate's in the dark. “Brad.”

“I'm not sorry.”

“We discussed this.” Of course, it hadn't been much of a discussion. There was no discussion to be _had_.

“We're home.” Brad pressed harder against him. “You're out, or as good as. What, exactly, is your problem?”

Nate couldn't believe him. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Crazy about you,” Brad deadpanned. “Stark raving mad. What?”

“Look,” Nate said, baffled and frustrated that he was being asked to articulate something that Brad was more than smart enough to know for himself at the age of twenty-seven with a career in the infantry, “sometimes this-- these things can happen, in combat. It's a consequence of the environment. And it's best to just move on, and forget about it.”

He'd seen the expression on Brad's face exactly twice before-- once when they turned back three dozen Iraqi surrenders into the desert, and once when a civilian hamlet he was observing was hit by an air strike. It was Brad very intentionally relaxing all of his muscles, gathering up everything inside of himself that was not strictly professional, and packing it away.

Nate was familiar with this method, and he liked to think that his own 'packing-it-up' expression was not so obvious. But, as had been established, he was full of shit when it came to hiding what he was feeling from Brad Colbert.

He should just get up and leave, but it sat sour in his stomach to have this be the last he saw of Brad in a casual setting, the last honest conversation they would ever have. It was beneath both of them to leave all of Iraq like this, over something like this. “It happens, Brad.” He clenched his fists under the table. “It doesn't mean anything. We're still-- we're good.”

Something flickered across Brad's face-- surprise, and something almost like curiosity, like Nate was an indistinct structure in the distance that he had first mistaken for a mirage. “You're fucked up about this,” he said, with what sounded like genuine awe. “I thought East-Coast Ivy-Leaguers were falling over themselves to outdo each other on tolerance. Did something happen to you?”

Nate swallowed the 'it's none of your fucking business', because it would just sound like 'yes'. Brad clearly had some idea in his head of what Nate's reasoning was. “Nothing 'happened'. I'm just realistic.”

“Jesus, Nate.” Finally, the boot slid back to Brad's side of the table. “Do you even _like_ women?”

Okay, _that_ was none of his fucking business, and it was also asking. “Thin ice, Brad.”

Brad leaned back in his chair, face slack. He looked completely lost. “So you're what? A monk? Or do you slum it at gas stations and shithouses like it's the nineteen fucking seventies?”

“You're one to talk,” Nate spat. It infuriated him, when he stopped to think about it. Brad liked women. Brad had a choice, and he still whored around. One day he'd meet some surfer chick with big tits and a bigger vocabulary and hang up his spurs and see no consequences for any of it. He had no right to an opinion on how Nate lived his life.

“You're not religious. Is it your family?”

“Brad,” he said, aware he was begging. “Please.”

Brad sat in silence for several minutes, during which time Nate realized that he was very much not in any condition to get himself home.

“Okay sir,” Brad said, finally. He sounded almost kind. “But you should know it's bullshit.”

Nate tensed. “I don't need a fucking lecture on life decisions from you, Sergeant. You're out of line.”

“Not that,” Brad said. “What you said earlier was full of shit. It doesn't 'happen sometimes'. Not to me.” He stood, pushing his chair back. “In fact, in twenty-seven years, it's happened twice.”

Nate swallowed hard. “I don't want to hear this.”

“Yeah.” Brad shrugged. “But I'm telling you so you know, if in a month or a year you decide to stop being a pussy, you should call me.” It was ludicrous, and self-abasing, and he managed to look completely assured and unembarrassed while saying it. He picked the helmet up calmly. “I'm going to call you a cab. You can coordinate with Poke about your car.”

Nate latched onto the banality of the logistics like a drowning man. “Are you good to drive?”

Brad scoffed. “In twenty-five mile-an-hour traffic? I'm fine. You, however, are sloshed.” He zipped up his jacket. Standing while Nate sat, he seemed even huger than usual. Nate knew he should stand and shake hands, something, but he couldn't move, and he wasn't sure he could bear touching Brad like this. Brad seemed fine, unbothered; Nate should feel relieved, but instead there was something huge and cold opening in his gut, a yawning emptiness. Somewhere tonight, he'd made a serious mistake-- or it was earlier mistakes, piled up, finally manifesting themselves.

He took a deep breath, and packed it away.

“Good night, sir,” Brad said, and went to talk to the bartender.

 

* * *

 

_March, 2005. Boston, Massachusetts_

“Post-traumatic stress disorder” sounded too clinical and serious for what it was. Nate wasn't pathological. But it wasn't just post-combat stress, either, because the problems didn't start until he was in the second year of his graduate program, two years after they had first piled into C-130s in the dark, bound for Kuwait.

It never got really bad for him, because he was paying attention.

A box truck swerved into the bike lane as he was heading to class early on a Tuesday. Instead of braking and pulling onto the sidewalk to take a deep breath, he merged into the road, rode up on the guy's left, and banged on the window until he got out.

He was a squat, red-faced man with a townie accent and a beer gut, puffed up like an adder. “The fuck is your problem?”

“You're in a lane of traffic, you dumb fuck,” Nate shouted, over the click click clicking of the truck's hazard lights. “You didn't signal, it's not a loading zone, you could have killed someone.”

He saw the guy double-take at him, like he'd just realized that Nate, khakis and bookbag and faggy road bike aside, had six inches on him and a thousand-yard stare. “Jesus kid, chill out. You're fine.”

Nate dropped his bag on the ground and flipped the kickstand on the bike, dismounting. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“What the fuck?”

“Get out of here before I break your fucking nose.” He wanted to do a lot more than that. He was envisioning beating the guy's face until it was unrecognizable. Breaking his skull open on the curb. Crowbar and gasoline. He wanted to kill him. The anger and hatred he felt for this complete stranger, this civilian, was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

“Psycho,” the man spat, and climbed back into the cab, shutting off the hazards. The truck crept obnoxiously slowly away from the curb as Nate watched, crawling at 10 mph. A last fuck you.

It took him twenty minutes to walk to Harvard wheeling the bike. When he got into the grad office, he closed the door, dialed his health insurance company, and set up an assessment with a psychiatrist.

\-----

He never dreamed about Iraq. Sometimes it was Clement's Creek, sometimes France or Belgium. It was always a war. He always carried an Enfield, which either jammed or was out of rounds. Brad was always there. If he wasn't, it was because he was missing or captured, and Nate had to find him.

Those were the dreams he remembered, anyway. Most of them he didn't. He'd wake up in the deepest darkness he had ever experienced, sure that something was standing in his doorway, his entire body cold with sweat. It would be outer-space dark, Marianas-trench dark. He would be completely paralyzed. The thing in the doorway would watch him for approximately eight eternities of mindless, immobilized terror. Then he would wake up again, and it would still be dark, but it was his studio apartment in Cambridge, with light pollution oozing through the shades and the sound of cars stopping and starting at the Porter Square intersection. And depending on whether he had an 0800 class he'd either go for a run or have a drink and try to go back to sleep.

After four months of appointments with a world-class psychiatrist at Mt. Auburn hospital, which _did_ help, he started leaving out the drinking part. He reasoned that Dr. Albrecht was perfectly capable of asking him directly. He wasn't going to lie about it. But he stopped volunteering the information.

\-----

Nate gave his first paper ( _Limitations of Maneuver Warfare In Low-Intensity Conflict, a Case Study_ ) at the tail end of a local International Policy conference. He realized halfway through the Q&A that he was never going into politics, and if he stayed in academia any longer than absolutely necessary, he was in very real danger of starting a fistfight with a faculty member.

The Marriot conference center had a cash bar and they cut him off at 10pm, when the room Harvard had reserved for their press-the-flesh session was mostly emptied out. Nate stared down at the dregs of his completely unremarkable $12 glass of red and half-followed the argument on von Clauswitz that was raging next to him; a bunch of political science graduate students from private universities who had never been outside of their bubble. They tossed theories of war around like they were garden party witticisms, each one trying to best the prior speaker, to appease some childlike insecurity about not being the smartest individual in the room. It made him want to scream. Some of the best, bravest, most honest men Nate knew were dumb as rocks. Disposable people, as far as these adult children were concerned, or blood-thirsty imperialist stooges.

Of course, he _was_ blood-thirsty. He hadn't been in combat, but he was now sometimes, when he stood in line at Starbucks or caught a glimpse of FOX or CNN at the wrong moment in a waiting room. He had a deep, black anger in him that surfaced in times of banality and stillness, the stupidity and selfishness of civilized life. Nate's life was so easy now, so comfortable. Dr. Albrecht talked at him about survivor's guilt, but Nate hadn't lost anyone-- and the girl by the roadside, the boy on the airfield, they hadn't been Nate's to lose.

1/1 was still out there. This time, it was Afghanistan. He only knew because Cara Wynn hadn't remembered to take him off the platoon party planning mailing list, and he'd gotten BCC'd an invitation to a pre-deployment potluck in Carlsbad. There was a note at the bottom about Skyping Brad in from Plymouth where he was stationed with the RM. More things Nate hadn't known. All this time he'd been picturing Brad in California: holding court at Pendleton, cutting a line through the Pacific with his board as the sun rose, rucking up mountainsides where hawks turned overhead and red clay dusted his boots. Brad in his element; but none of it had been the case.

“Hey, Fick.” A hand rapped on the tabletop in front of him. He recognized Taylor's wristwatch. Taylor Spaulding was an International Relations Ph.D. candidate whom Nate occasionally shared a desk with in the Widener Library. He knew French, Farsi, and Arabic. Nate could have used him. “We're walking to Shawmut, find somewhere to drink. You in?”

Nate tipped the wine glass, watched the dark eye of the last swallow blink white with the reflection of the lights in the drop ceiling. “Thanks. But I should get home.”

Taylor laughed. “Like that? Come on, we'll carpool back to Camberville.” He jerked his thumb at the flock of loosened ties and shed jackets behind him. Nate recognized Elliot Burk from Theories of Foreign Policy, and two women who were vaguely familiar. The redhead was from the History department, working on something about British Naval records; he'd seen the blonde hovering around the PoliSci offices. “Jenna's the DD. Live a little.”

Nate thought, _I've done more living than you would wish on anyone_ , and then immediately scolded himself for being maudlin. He was warm, and fed, and not under fire. He had no right to feel sorry for himself. “Yeah. Okay.” He slammed back the last bit of wine and retrieved his messenger bag from under the table.

\-----

After three Jack & Cokes and a plate of prophylactic waffle fries arguing with the redhead about socialism was starting to seem like a good idea, so he removed himself to the sticky alleyway in the rear and leaned with his face against the cool bricks for several minutes, wishing he were unconscious or, barring that, had a cigarette. He was nostalgic for the burn of the unfiltered smokes from the Baghdad factory, how lighting one had made his eyes water and his throat ache as the buzz hit. He was nostalgic for standing with Brad in the concrete stairwell, arguing about the Punic Wars, listening to him cough. Brad would find Nate going toe to toe with a professed communist hilarious.

He could see a sliver of Tremont Street from where he stood. Cars crawled by; students chattered on the sidewalk in knots, lit by neon. He fished his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. Oh-dark-thirty in England. Ninety mikes past reveille in Kabul. But who knew where Brad was these days. Maybe he was back in California on leave, visiting his family and watching the sun set. He realized that he was running his thumb over the keypad of his Nokia, scrolling through contacts. Colbert, B. Brad's cell, probably defunct. Brad's landline, to an empty house.

“You should call her,” said a voice to his right. “It never hurts.”

Nate looked up to see a man staring at him, dressed casually in a leather jacket and jeans. He was broad and tall and Nate double-took at him in the dark before he corrected, without thinking about how it would sound, “Him.”

The man's eyebrows went up. He grinned with all of his teeth. He looked about forty. “Figures. Not a twink to be seen at the Eagle on a Friday night, but here you are at Prepville Station with the yuppie singles, dressed like Bobby Kennedy. I despair of Boston.”

“Excuse me?”

“A year of legalized marriage and you young ones are fully assimilated.” The man leaned against the wall next to him, arms crossed over his chest. He was still smiling. He was handsome; symmetrical and clean-shaven and he had that alertness Nate always liked in people, an aggressive curiosity that made him sit up and take notice. “Are you and your 'him' civilly unionized, or did you go whole hog?”

“He's just a friend,” Nate said. If that; he hadn't heard from Brad in over a year. Actual Brad, that is-- for someone completely absent from Nate's life, the man took up a disproportionate amount of his mental real estate. He dreamed about him (and went to therapy for it), wrote about him (and deleted those sections of his draft), and, on more than one shameful, lonely occasion, jerked off to the thought of him in the shower instead of the usual menagerie of faceless bodies.

“Oh,” the man said, knowingly. “One of _those_. In that case, don't call. No good will come of it.” He stuck his hand out, forcing Nate to pocket the phone in order to shake it. “I'm David.”

“Chris,” Nate said.

“You smoke, Chris?”

“Yeah.” Nate accepted the menthol and smoked in near silence, nodding and humming and dredging up appropriate responses as David talked him up. He was from Boston originally, and lived in Sweetwater, Texas. He had a bachelor's in mathematics, but working as an HVAC technician paid more and he got to move around instead of festering at a desk. He was in town to see his family; the Red Sox were still terrible, but he loved them for it. The Boston Eagle was the oldest gay bar in town, but these days it was full of straight girls having a night out and gym bunnies without a braincell between them. Nate had nice eyes; David bet he broke hearts.

The hand on his hip didn't surprise him, but he flinched anyway. He pushed smoke out through his teeth in a hiss and closed his eyes, skin buzzing. Fuck. It had been a _really_ long time.

“You're skittish,” David noted. “Don't get out much?”

“Do _you_ get out much?” Nate countered, “In _Sweetwater, Texas_?”

“I got a boy just like you back home,” David rumbled, and Nate felt the smile against his neck, the scratch of stubble over skin blown cold by the evening. His heart pounded. “Ollie. Smart kid.”

“Yet you're picking up strange men in alleyways.”

“I sense disapproval, young padawan.” David undid his belt deftly, shoving his cold hand inside. Nate's entire body jolted. “But you're not stopping me.”

“Fuck.” Nate dropped the cigarette. The pads of his fingers ground into the brick wall behind him, scoring and scraping. “You just-- you remind me of someone.”

“Hm.” David dropped to his knees and fumbled Nate out through his shorts. He had a buzz cut-- looking down on him, bare neck and broad shoulders, it was easy to imagine. Nate refused to. “Your 'him'? What's his name?” He breathed a hot puff of air over Nate's cock, which twitched.

“Brad,” Nate gritted out, already regretting it because of how sweet it felt in his mouth, this word he always ached to speak. _Brad, Brad, Brad._

“Straight boy name,” David offered, and swallowed him.

\-----

Jenna dumped him out at the corner and he eased his way down the stairs to his 'garden-level' unit, one hand on the wall in the dark. He sat down on the sofa, and must have passed out at some point, because at 0500 his alarm rang. He pulled on his running gear automatically and peeled out of the building down the street in the damp morning dark. His legs felt like he was running through mud.

By 0520 he was sitting on the riverside, staring out at the Charles and ignoring how the sliver of red light reflected in the water was searing his eyes. There was a kind of masochistic satisfaction in courting his headache. He tipped his water bottle again and gave it a squeeze to get the last little swallow. Should have brought two. He was transitioning from still-drunk to hungover.

“Rough night? Oh shit, sorry. Jax!”

A pair of white paws scrambled down the rocks next to him, and a soft muzzle buried itself in the crook of his leg where he sat. Nate stared dumbly at the dog for a moment before giving it a scratch behind the ears. A tail beat rhythmically against his back where his shirt stuck to his skin.

“Sorry,” the voice said again, and Nate looked up to see a woman, mid-twenties, blonde and fit and swimming in an MIT hoodie. “He's kind of a slut.”

The dog leaned into him and whined pitifully between heavy pants. A Samoyed. It was huge and warm and soft, like a heavy blanket over the chilling skin of his legs. “It's okay.”

“You look beat,” the woman said, and sat down next to him, shaking the loop of the leash off of her wrist as she did so. The dog didn't seem to notice. “Not that I'm complaining. Normally you power through here so fast I can't even make eye contact.”

Nate squinted at her. She was just vaguely familiar.

“Red Asics, green hat?” the woman asked, and waggled her feet in her go-fasters, laughing. “I guess you wouldn't notice anyone going under fifteen miles an hour. Are you training for something? You've always got this serious look on your face.”

The dog flopped down and rolled onto its side, breath slowing. “I-- no.”

“So I'm being too forward,” she announced, and stuck a hand out. Nate shook it automatically, just awake enough to be surprised by the strength of her grip. “I'm Lindy. You can tell me to fuck off, by the way. It won't hurt my feelings.”

Nate stared, sluggish and numb. “You're barking up the wrong tree, Lindy.” The part of him that was constantly monitoring how he might be perceived, or misperceived, in public, to avoid arousing suspicion added, “I'm spoken for.”

“Oh?” she said, and then, “Well.” She laughed. “Worth a shot, right?”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Nate said, wondering why the fuck he couldn't just behave like a normal human being any more.

She bounced up, wrangling the leash with her toe. “Wanna get coffee anyway? No offense, but you look like you need it.”

Nate stared at the oily surface of the Charles and thought about Clement's Creek, back when life was manageable and he had the courage to make the right decisions, if not always the wisdom.

“Sure,” he said, and stood.

\-----

Lindy turned out to be a statistics grad student with two brothers in the Army and a nearly wonkish obsession with fiscal policy. She was brilliant, and she'd bullied a summary of Nate's paper and its unimpressive reception out of him within ten minutes.

“Well no wonder they gave you shit,” she said. “You had no data.”

“It was a case study,” Nate gritted, into his styrofoam cup of weak Dunkin' Donuts.

“Which you experienced personally, points to subjectivity, and then considered retroactively. When you went in, you weren't thinking about it like a study and didn't follow any experimental protocols.” She shrugged. “It's not a criticism of the argument. You just have the wrong audience. Everything is metrics-driven for these guys.”

“The Iraq War is a sample size of one. We'll have metrics in ten years, when we can conclusively say that the population of jihadists in this country or that has doubled as a result of American foreign policy. That's not useful.”

She smiled at him, like he was funny. The dog beat its tail against the floor. “I wish I had your problem. Anyone can see you have an agenda-- hey, let me finish.”

Nate shut his mouth.

“It's a good thing. Someone has to actually _do_ something about all this. But academics don't trust agendas. Not having the numbers is a great excuse to ignore you.” She gestured at him vaguely. “Or, you know, imply you're a jingoist or a coward or whatever. Depending on which circles you run in.”

Nate considered this. It both did, and didn't, align with his experience of academia, but Mike Wynn had taught him the value of taking advice from the people in a position to give it. “I'll keep that in mind,” he said, finally.

“Sooo you're seeing someone?” Lindy asked, drumming her short, green nails on the tabletop.

“I-- yeah.”

“Does she live around here?”

“No,” Nate said, which wasn't a lie. Then he said, “California,” which was.

Lindy sighed dreamily. “Oh, Cali. I've only been once. It's so gorgeous.”

Nate winced, thinking of the more popular segments of Oceanside. “Some parts, anyway.” He tried to steer the conversation away from an area where he might slip up, like he had last night. “What did you mean, you 'wish you had my problem'?”

Lindy laughed. “I'm a rebel without a cause, here.” She gestured vaguely out the window where the Charles, and Harvard beyond it, was half-hidden behind a decal advertising seasonal donuts. “I like stat, and I'm good at it, but I'm not sure what it's _for_ yet. There's nothing I care that much about. I know I want to do some good in the world, but I don't know what that means. I'm always changing my mind about things. If your job is to, like, cure cancer or solve world hunger you have the luxury of being monomaniacal about it, because cancer is unquestionably bad.” She shrugged. “Like, I got interested in finance because I wanted to help with the debt crisis. But the more I read the actual data, the more convinced I became that monetary policy isn't really the problem I thought it was, and working for the Federal Reserve or whatever isn't going to help normal people who are down on their luck. Everything's like that for me-- it seems like all the places my skillset is needed aren't the places I want to be.”

Nate nodded. “I understand that.” He did. More than he was comfortable admitting to a civilian, frankly.

Lindy peered at him over her styrofoam cup, calculating. “You're going to do something good. Maybe you don't know what it is yet, but when you figure it out--” she rummaged in her pocket and produced a square of card stock and a stubby pencil with a cap eraser, scrawling an email address and the words, 'statistics/R/data analysis & visualization/policy'. “Drop me a line. I might be interested in helping.”

“Are you _networking_ with me?” Nate accused, genuinely disconcerted by the ease with which she had adjusted her approach.

She laughed. “You want me to flirt more? It wasn't getting me anywhere.”

Nate smiled into his cup, charmed despite himself. The dog grumbled, rolled over, and licked his ankle where sweat had dried. It tickled. He needed a shower.

“I should get home,” he said, and shook her hand, tucking the business card away.

\-----

Later at his desk, hair still wet, he keyed 'Meyers, Rosalind' into his contacts list and sat there dripping onto his blotter, an Interlibrary Loan request form, and a macerated draft of the chapter about the approach to Baghdad. He had struck a clean red 'X' across a paragraph describing how Brad had looked standing in the middle of the highway, a towering deadly monolith worriedly angling his M-16 towards the ground as a stoop-backed woman held a wailing, dehydrated infant up against his flak vest in desperation, like just touching an American was a good luck charm.

Nate had been frustrated that day at how the refugees were delaying them, at how slack the guys got around kids and women and elderly people. He had been especially grateful to Brad because he had remained steadfastly professional, serving as an example for his team in a way the other TLs hadn't. Nate knew it was difficult for him-- nothing effected Brad like child casualties-- but Brad hadn't picked up that baby. He'd kept one hand on the stock of his rifle, and with the other hand he'd pushed the woman away, back into the procession. To Nate, that had been a heroic display of strength and restraint on Brad's part, just one more example of Brad being an exceptional Marine, a man who took leadership as seriously as Nate did. That was what he'd meant while writing it, but in print, it looked like an instance of heartlessness and hypocrisy, Brad failing to recognize the humanity of the Iraqi people. There was no way for Nate to explain the rest of the story without giving himself away. He could not write, as he had wanted to,

_Later that week Sergeant Colbert revealed to me during watch that his parents had brought him to the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. as a child, and he had never forgotten the stories of families being separated as they were lined up to be placed on the trains. I had grown up in Maryland and as a result had visited this same museum many times, usually in the context of school field trips for History class. What I remembered of it was what most people remember: the monumental pile of shoes which is on permanent exhibit, a pitiless representation of the industrialized genocide of the camp ovens. Colbert talked with me about the Holocaust for nearly an hour, but he never mentioned the camps. What haunted him, a man raised in the Jewish tradition, was what came before: the train cars, the ruthlessly efficient shuttling of people in indiscriminate units without regard for familial ties, such that a woman and her child, or two siblings, could be shipped off in opposite directions to die without ever knowing what happened to each other._

_“_ _They had a train car on exhibit,” he said. “One of the ones that went to Dachau. I remember standing in it and exactly how dark it was, how it smelled.”_

_I thought about how Sergeant Colbert had modified my order at the road block; where I had said, let them through in sets of forty, he had said, thirty five or forty, and keep the families together. At the time, I had heard this as a primarily tactical consideration to avoid confusion and reduce the risk of disturbance on the part of the refugees, and I'd been grateful that Colbert was, as always, so adept at executing orders on the ground in ways that were appropriate to the specific situation he found his team in. I still think that was his primary motivation. But when he looked at me and described the smell of the train car in the museum, I was forced to acknowledge that he was struggling with our presence in Iraq in a way I was not, and would not allow myself to until we had returned to California. In a way, platoon command was a blessing for me-- it mandated that I care only for the well-being of two-dozen individuals. It was my job not to think about anything else, and I was ruthless with myself when it came to compartmentalizing away my feelings about civilians._ _After I left the Corps and had the opportunity to examine our time in Iraq in retrospect, I frequently found myself wanting to call Colbert-- not to apologize for how I had conducted myself in country, because I had done my job to the best of my ability, but to acknowledge, belatedly, the gravity of the things he had told me that night in Baghdad, one human being to another. At the time, I could not be a human being--_ _I had to be the Lieutenant._

Sometimes Nate swore that he remembered every word Brad ever spoke to him. His psychiatrist told him to write freeform without editing, and to give himself permission to “work out” what he needed to. If Nate did that, his book would end up being the world's longest, most miserable love letter in history. Everywhere his subconscious led him, every roadside ditch and wadi and sleepless night on factory concrete, Brad was there in one way or another: Watching his back. Commiserating. Asking more of him when Nate felt like he had nothing left to give, unearthing stores of strength in Nate that he hadn't known were there. Giving Nate the best gifts he could ask for from a subordinate-- unwavering trust and brutal honesty.

Brad had offered other gifts, not as the Sergeant, but just as _Brad:_ little pockets of stillness and relief, glimpses into his vulnerability. A chance to be human with him, if only for a moment. Nate turned away every time, and still Brad had offered.

' _If in a month, or a year--_ '

Before he could stop to think about it, he scrolled through his contacts and dialed Brad's cell. His heart jerked and tripped in his chest. He felt wild and impulsive like he had last night in the alleyway. He had no idea what he wanted to say to Brad, only that he had to say _something._

The line rang, and rang. On the seventh ring, he hung up.

 


	3. Chapter 3

_December, 2008. Los Angeles, California_

The round, cold bottom of a beer bottle appeared over Nate's shoulder and he took it reflexively, thinking that it was Mike standing behind him. He was a little fuzzy already, but he had a ride back to the hotel set up, so he intended to enjoy himself.

“There's something undignified about a peacenik reporter hosting the platoon reunion at his liberal den of sin,” said Brad Colbert, directly into his ear.

Nate wheeled around and nearly smashed his nose against the Landshark Brad was holding. “Brad! Scuttlebutt was you weren't coming.” He managed to hook an arm around Brad's shoulder and thumped him twice on the back before forcing himself away, still clear-headed enough to remember that he didn't want to be clingy.

“You should know better than to listen to gossip, sir,” Brad said, and grinned. “I wasn't planning to, but Person threatened to cry. You know how he is.”

“Fuck you, Bradley,” Ray Person said, emerging from behind Brad's back at a lean like he was clearing a corner. “I was just trying to get you out of the barracks so your ass doesn't permanently adhere to your gaming chair, you sad, anti-social fuck. Good to see you, Sir.”

“Likewise, Ray,” Nate said. “Gaming chair?”

“He plays World of Warcraft,” Ray informed him, with a whisper that was not a whisper at all. “In the Year of Our Lord 2008. If that isn't a sign of major depression then you can relieve me of my doctorate in Marine Mental Disorders and Deficiencies.”

Nate raised his eyebrows at Brad, who shrugged. “Ray's just jealous because he's never defeated the Orc King.”

“Have _you_ defeated the Orc King?” Nate wondered.

“I am the division lead in Orc King kills,” Brad deadpanned, which confirmed Nate's suspicion that there was no such King. “Ray, didn't you have some poor girl to inflict your company and your medieval bestiary of venereal diseases upon?”

“Her name is Ashley,” Ray said. “And she's my fiancee, so all diseases are split 50/50.”

“It's legal in Missouri to marry a girl with an IQ below 60,” Brad informed Nate, flatly, “provided the groom is likewise retarded and has obtained parental permission.”

“Congratulations, Ray,” Nate said, and tipped his beer. “Really. I'd love to meet her, if she's here?”

“Later,” Ray breezed, and tottered off in the direction of the snacks, shouting for Rudy to get his sweet, sweet ass over to the crostinis so he could explain to Ray what the fuck a crostini was.

“She's a rocket scientist, actually,” Brad said, watching him go. “She writes navigational software for NASA.” He gestured at the gaggle of t-shirt and jeans-clad young men near the pool, whom Nate had assumed were Reporter's friends. “That's her Silicon Valley posse.”

“I'll steer clear,” Nate said. “Thanks for the warning.”

Brad looked slyly at him. “What makes you think it was a warning?”

“ _You_ saying it.”

Brad grinned, all teeth, and Nate's drunk head pounded _I miss you, I miss you_ like a PT cadence. “Point, sir. Want to step outside, so we're not at risk of ambush by nerd?”

“You _are_ a nerd,” Nate pointed out, but followed him up the stairs and onto a window balcony, which was unoccupied save for some empty bottles and had a fantastic view of the city.

Brad leaned against the rail with his arms folded. “Not that I'm complaining, but you came all the way out here for this?”

“I'd come to all of them if I could,” Nate said. “I was at USC.”

“Aiming for another title, Captain? Nate Fick, Ph.D?”

“Giving a paper.”

“Nate Fick, Author,” Brad said, saluting him with the bottle. “Congratulations.”

Nate felt his neck prickle. Ridiculous, to be blushing. “Thanks. But I was there in my capacity as executive director,” he laughed, shaking his head in a pathetic attempt to hide his face, “which, I am well aware, sounds even more pretentious.”

Brad was silent for a moment, bending down to set his empty on the slate flooring. “That's what I get for not showing up to class reunions. What are you now, a venture capitalist?”

“Asshole,” Nate said. The cool air was sobering him up. “I run a non-profit. It's small. The title's only that way because we have a board.”

“You have a board,” Brad repeated, slowly. “Of course you do. Where would you be, without overbearing institutional incompetence?”

“They aren't that bad,” Nate lied.

“Hm. And from what do you not profit, Executive Director Fick?”

“The Institute for the Study of Low-Intensity Conflict,” Nate said, and it still felt strange, to be official; they'd only just decided on the name, “produces research and white papers on American foreign policy and modern warfare, with the goal of minimizing blowback from policy decisions. That's the buzzword in Washington right now, 'blowback'.” He shrugged. “I'm not thrilled with the marketing aspect, as you can imagine.”

“It sounds good, sir,” Brad said, quietly, even though they were alone. “It sounds important.”

“Yeah.” Nate drained his beer and wished for another. He wondered if any of the empties on the balcony were not really empty. “Did you-- how was England?”

“Afghanistan was fine,” Brad said, which was what Nate had really wanted to ask, although how Brad knew that was beyond him, “The first time. The second, lost a corporal in Helmand to an IED. My driver was burned badly, but recovered. He chose not to re-enlist.”

Nate shuddered. “You were in the truck?”

Brad nodded. “Got blown twelve feet from it.” He laughed, bitterly. “Not a scratch on me.”

“You're lucky.”

“Funny thing,” Brad said, gripping the rail tight, “it was at night. Pointless, dumb as fuck busy-work escort that could have waited until morning. I spent the whole ride thinking, _Fick would never have agreed to this_. And after-- it wouldn't have happened, if you'd been in command.”

Nate realized he was clenching his jaw tight enough to hurt. What did Brad want him to say to that?

Brad's hand landed on his elbow. “I meant, sir, that I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing. It matters.”

Nate blinked at him, head pounding. He felt vaguely sick. His mind was still stuck on the image of Brad being knocked four yards from an exploding vehicle while his driver burned inside of it. How had he not heard about this? How had no one seen fit to tell him?

“Nate.” Brad shook him, very lightly. “Are you okay?”

Nate licked his lips. “I'm fine.”

“You still drink too much,” Brad told him. He was watching Nate's face closely, inspecting him. Looking for something.

“Says the Marine who brought me a beer.” Now he knew he was blushing. He hated the shame; he didn't deserve to feel it. Still felt it every time he took out the recycling, clink clink clink like he lived in a frat house and not alone with heaps of books and two potted succulents. But he didn't deserve it. He ran, he went to work, he wrote and was published, he gave talks at universities and lead board meetings. He was firing on all cylinders. Good to go.

Brad's thumb brushed the inside of his elbow over his sleeve, and then he withdrew. “I read your book.”

“Yeah?” Nate asked gamely, wondering when he was going to stop feeling like live current was running under his skin, overstimulated and overheated and yeah, drunk.

“I'm shocked you were outsold by _The Audacity of Hope_ ,” Brad said. “It seems your narrative of lost faith is not what bedside tables across America are yearning for.”

“ _Twilight_ came out that year, too,” Nate reminded him, falling gratefully into the easy repartee. “I think most Americans are yearning for sexy vampires.” He took the obvious bait. “Did the election hurt much, Colbert?”

They bitched pleasantly for another half an hour, at which point Nate had to excuse himself to find the restroom. After washing his hands he remained leaning against the sink for several minutes and admitted that he needed to leave if he wanted to have any chance of making his flight in the morning.

The door banging open startled him. Ray Person rounded the corner and stopped stock still in front of Nate, staring at him like he was an alien life form.

“Hey Ray,” Nate said, wiping his hands on a paper towel. “I'm heading out soon. Did you want to introduce me to Ashley?”

“Uh,” Ray said. “I dunno where she is. Sorry.”

“All right. It was good to see you.”

It had been good. He missed all of his men. They were still 'his'. He resolved to be better about staying in touch.

“Yeah,” Ray said, and Nate thought, _he must be completely hammered, it's like he doesn't recognize me_ , “Yeah. Bye.”

Later-- much later-- he would remember this moment.

 

* * *

 

_November, 2011. Anne Arundel, Maryland_

“Jesus Christ, Nate,” Lindy said when she finally picked up. “I told you, I left the CRS memos and my analysis on your desk, stop fucking texting me about it.”

Nate sucked air in through his teeth and reminded himself that Lindy, being technically an independent contractor and (more importantly) a civilian, was not legally mandated to give him the time of day. “I'm out of town. Please just send me the PDFs. Whatever you have.”

“What I have is three pounds of green beans to chop, a teething nephew, and no time to deal with this.”

“It will only take a second,” Nate snapped. “Bill me overtime for it if you want.”

“You're lucky I like you.” He heard the nephew wailing in the background, the fumbling noises of Lindy tucking the phone into her shoulder and opening a laptop. “I'm emailing you a zip file. You'll have to extract them.”

He had no idea what that meant. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Ask your little sister.” She snorted. “Oh, right. You're only bothering me on Thanksgiving because you're hiding from your family.”

“I'm 'bothering' you,” Nate gritted out, “because I am trying to get important work done, and—"

“Sent,” Lindy interrupted. “For the record, I'm going to state the obvious, which is that this could have waited until Monday. Put your Protestant work ethic aside for five seconds and eat some turkey. You're being an asshole, and I'm worried about you.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Nate bit out, but she had already hung up on him.

Really, was it so much to ask that his co-founder and research director appreciate the immediacy of the work they were doing? Sure, their publisher was closed for the week on account of the holiday, but that didn't mean that Nate couldn't work on his proofs to have them ready as soon as possible when they re-opened. He'd already wasted too much of his day sitting in traffic on I-95 cramped inside a shitty rental Acura, trying to make it to his parent's place in Cape St. Claire like he'd promised two months ago (and had immediately regretted).

He'd arrived at 1pm and spent the next four hours trying and failing to find a quiet location in the house to set his laptop up and get some work done. Everyone kept interrupting him. By the time he'd finally had enough martinis that closing the door to his father's study no longer seemed unbearably rude, but rather a matter of necessity, he'd managed to snap at his sister, his father, both cousins, and the dog.

Of course, now he had to emerge and find someone who knew what the hell a 'zip file' was. He clicked helplessly at the email attachment Lindy had provided him, trying one 'open with' program after another: Notepad, Internet Explorer, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word-- they all got him either error messages, or garbled text. He hated how much of his time was wasted on this kind of bullshit. He needed a secretary.

The door opened behind behind him as he was ready to slam his fist into the desk in frustration, startling him enough that he bit the inside of his cheek.

“ _What_ ,” he snapped around the throbbing flesh, whirling the chair around.

It was his mother. She stepped inside the study, closed the door behind herself, and burst into tears.

Nate stared. Fuck. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her cry because of him. He stood and tentatively wrapped her in a hug, feeling numb.

“Why are you even here,” she asked, batting weakly at his elbow, “if you don't want to see us?”

“I'm sorry,” Nate said, into her hair. “I'm just really busy.” He was always busy. He knew if he stopped for a second, he'd plummet. ISLIC was too important to sacrifice on the altar of his personal issues.

“It's a holiday, Nathaniel.” She sniffed. “Sometimes I feel like you didn't even come home.”

Nate stiffened. “Don't say that to me. It's enormously disrespectful.”

“It's how I feel.”

“Some people didn't come home. Really didn't, mom. And a lot of my men are still out there, risking their lives. On this 'holiday'.”

He didn't get to know details anymore, but Mike passed on all the information about 1/1 that he could, by email when he was around and through Cara when he wasn't. Right now, they were in the midst of pre-deployment training before being dispatched to Camp Leatherneck.

Some of Nate's Marines were already in Afghanistan, and had been for many months: Brad and Kocher had left Recon for MARSOC in 2009 for the chance to go to the Phillipines, and now they were each working in Special Operations Task Forces in Helmand, with scarcely a break in between deployments; Nate occasionally received interesting, if uninformative, post-cards from Brad. Chaffin, Christeson, and Garza were employed by private companies, working as security contractors in some of the most dangerous parts of the country. Nate got their news by way of Q-Tip, who was friends with Christeson on Facebook, and through the various geopolitical analysis outlets he paid a premium to access, because sometimes they mentioned the firefights Dyncorp or Global Security Solutions PMCs wound up in long before the national media did.

“Nate,” his mother mumbled, into his shoulder, “we're worried. We've been patient. It's been eight years--”

Worried. Nate _never_ stopped worrying about them. He never stopped holding his breath for a moment when he paged through the newspaper or scrolled down his RSS feed every morning, anticipating some headline that would go unnoticed by 99% of Americans. All those people who didn't understand, who thought that a war that dragged on for ten years was no war at all, just because it didn't effect them anymore.

He realized that he was saying, _shouting_ this aloud when the white noise of his family talking and laughing behind the door suddenly quieted. His mother's face was pale and blank in front of him. He was holding her away from him by the shoulders, and shaking.

“Honey,” she said. “Oh, honey.”

“It was a war,” Nate rasped, lowering his voice as much as he could without it breaking, “I killed people. I saw people-- children-- die. So I'm sorry if I'm still a little messed up by it, but your input is not needed or desired.”

She reached up to lay a hand on his wrist, pulling away. Nate thought, with a kind of distant gratitude, that she had the same 'packing it away' face as Brad did. She could be all business, his mother. “I'll tell everyone to leave you alone until we're ready to eat.”

He endured dinner with his best 'engaged and polite' persona on, but the damage was done. They all talked around him at the table, clearly avoiding any mention of anything that might set him off. His mother steered every awkward silence back towards either the side dishes, the weather, or the Orioles. Nate eventually gave up trying to participate and just worked on keeping his mouth full.

He dried plates and cutlery in silence in an assembly line with his sister and cousin, then bowed out on dessert, claiming that he wanted to make it at least as far as Philly while the traffic was light.

There was room for him on the sofa, but no one asked him to stay.

He didn't make it to Philly. He crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and stopped at the first gas station he saw so he could ask the teenager behind the counter how to open his email attachment. Then he bought two bottles of Jack Daniels Black Label and went to work.

Nate hit rock bottom in Room 6 of an otherwise empty roadside hotel in Stevensville, Maryland, on Thanksgiving of 2011. Only in retrospect would he accord the date any significance.

He wasn't especially hammered. It wasn't an especially bad night. It wasn't even a shitty room; he was hardly slumming it like a drunkard. There were clean sheets on the queen bed, a television, a 2-cup coffee machine and only slightly dusty blinds that the sun was setting through in a soft pink gradient. The walls were thick enough that he could work without being disturbed. The bathroom was clean enough to pass inspection.

He had his briefcase open on the desk and a glass of whiskey and was perfectly competently assembling an informational briefing on the long-term societal costs of IED-related brain injuries. Here were eight papers on co-morbid behavioral and conduct disorders, and here was a cogent argument from a scientist at BIAA that the DoD statistics on diagnosis of TBIs were too low, despite already showing a 300% increase in brain injuries across all the armed services since 2003. Here were sixteen testimonials from veterans that the VA provided insufficient resources to them on the subject, and here was the imploring letter he and ten other “public veterans” had received from the parents of an Army combat engineer who had come home from Afghanistan and shot his wife, his eldest daughter, and then himself.

Nate had read that letter so many times he no longer needed to look at it to pull quotes, but he found himself staring down at it anyway. It was a letter written by someone unaccustomed to writing, all short, simple, ungrammatical sentences that spoke of a grief too huge to comprehend:

_Never another Christmas or a birthday. We think of them Each and Every Day. Evan pulled the trigger but ALL of them were taken from us. Because no one helped him. He gave everything to the Army and they did not help him because he did not look wounded. Just because he could walk and see and work. He was very badly injured in Afghanistan. We told everyone we could think of but no one helped us and The United States Government and the VA failed Evan and they failed his family. Our family is shattered._

Nate had first formulated the project that would become ISLIC back in 2006 just after midterms, while he was in a drag-out fight with his editor about (of all things) the degree of technical detail in his book. He'd been bolting down a plain, slightly stale bagel in his studio apartment at 0600 and had scribbled the first draft of a mission statement down on the back of a CVS receipt before running out the door.

Since that moment, he had never once doubted that he was doing the right thing, the best thing he could be doing. He'd never wondered again about politics or teaching or policy, if he could be of more use elsewhere. He just knew, with a near-prophetic certainty, that the world couldn't wait for unapologetic, broad-reaching analysis of modern American warfare and its consequences. And maybe Nate wasn't the best person for the job, but no one else was doing it.

Alien light fell onto the letter from the window, spearing through the uncapped bottle and its contents, gilding his bare hands. The work was _too important_ to sacrifice on the altar of his personal issues.

This was the instant that he thought, very clearly and completely without shame, _I need help._

Then he realized he had no fucking idea what that meant, so he called Mike Wynn.

“I need help,” Nate said when he picked up. He could hear the girls in the background, football on the television. He didn't even know who was playing. “Will you help me?”

“Of course I will, you dumb bastard,” Mike said. He was completely unsurprised when Nate asked him to find a list of AA meetings on the Eastern Shore, and he stayed on the line while Nate poured a bottle and a half of Jack Daniels down the shower drain.

\-----

Ironically, the systematic nature of the program made it easy for him. Nate was used to enforcing rules on himself regardless of their apparent validity. Want a drink? Find a meeting. Don't want to go to a meeting? Tough shit. Think the meeting is full of brainwashed, morally feeble people repeating the court-mandated equivalent of pop psychology mantras? Your personal feelings are not helpful. Work the program. It works.

He was one of the morally feeble, apparently, because it did work. It _kept_ working.

 

* * *

 

_December, 2013. Acton, Massachusetts_

It probably said something not ideal about his work-life balance that when his phone rang at 8:15 AM on a Sunday morning he was already at his desk, and picked up automatically. “This is Nate Fick.”

“You're a piece of shit,” said the voice on the phone, which apparently did not belong to a recruiter. “And I can't believe I ever liked you.”

The cadence, more than the voice itself, pricked at his memory, but before he could say anything, Ray said, “It's Ray Person, dumbass.”

Nate put down his pen very carefully and settled back in his seat. He hadn't seen Ray in nearly four years, but he'd told all of his men to call anytime, and he meant it. He spoke with Mike and Evan Stafford regularly, and other members of the platoon occasionally contacted him by phone, email, or in Brad's case, trans-continental pony express, because he sent ironic, hyper-religious Christmas cards. In all of these interactions the relationships felt unchanged, like he'd just pressed 'Pause' on his Marines and wandered off for a little while before returning. Perversely, it made him feel old. “Hello, Ray. To what do I owe this morning's invective?”

Ray cursed him floridly, and said, “I'm making amends.”

Nate managed not to choke, but it was a near thing. His own two-year medallion was sitting directly in front of him in the pen groove of the roll-top, between a canister of paper-clips, his grandfather's USMC lighter, and a hand-painted ceramic seahorse bestowed upon him by his youngest niece. “You're working the steps?

“Like a boss,” Ray said, and then added, almost sulkily. “You piece of shit.”

Nate was biting the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling, although there was no one around to see him in his home office on a weekend, which was why he was wearing pajama pants and wool socks and nothing else. “I'm not sure your sponsor adequately explained Step Nine.”

“Oh, I'm not there yet,” Ray breezed. “Still working on the whole 'not drinking' thing. It's just that today is the first day that I am legally allowed to tell you, sir, that you are a piece of shit, and you should feel bad.”

Nate frowned. “You separated back in '05. You've been free to tell me whatever you like for nearly a decade now.”

There was a faint banging down the line, and a wail that sounded like 'ohhhhhh my God'. Then Ray was back, full volume. “Do you not have CNN where you live? FOX? Newspapers? Radios? Fucking telegrams and carrier pigeons?”

This was clearly a rhetorical question, so Nate waited, which was not necessary, because Person broke back in immediately. “The DADT repeal takes effect today, you massive cockmongler. You're a piece of shit for leading Brad on and breaking his heart and moving to Mt. Dicksuck Massachusetts to live your big gay life.”

Nate realized that he was staring out the window at the end of the property, where dry brown grasses poked up through the field of snow. It was scarcely eight-- the sky was clear and bright and cold and blue. Early in Missouri, certainly too early for Ray Person, civilian, unless he'd set an alarm. Because he wanted to call Nate today, specifically, on the day Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice was _officially_ amended to no longer prohibit consensual sodomy.

He thought, distinctly, 'this is the most surreal moment of my life', and then he realized that at some point in the last ten years, between tacky Hallmark holiday cards and casual platoon reunion cookouts where they talked easily about politics and books and the rare sardonic letter from fire bases in the far corners of the earth, _Brad had outed him_. He could barely _breathe_ he was so angry.

The hurt-- that surprised him.

“This is the part where I hang up and like... storm away,” Ray informed him, and did not hang up. “But I'm in my kitchen so there's nowhere to storm to but like... imaging me slamming a door. Bang.”

Nate closed his eyes. “Does Brad know you're calling me?”

“Pfft, homes, are you crazy? He'd neck me.” Ray made a noise evocative of a noose pulling tight. “But he's a big pussy so he'd never tell you himself. Now karmic balance has been restored.”

“Great,” Nate said, dazed by the surge of negative emotion he was currently sinking in. “Bye, Ray.”

He hung up and stared out at the field. A formation of geese was crossing over in a 'V' with arms that stretched to either tree-line. He felt physically sick like he hadn't since he got sober, like he was going to vomit, and he put his head down on the cool wood of the desk until the nausea subsided.

\-----

Christmas was the busiest time of year for meetings. Nate couldn't walk five paces in Boston proper without running into a group of people holding cheap paper cups and cigarettes as they spilled out onto the street from churches, libraries, community centers, and Ys. Boston had probably always been like this, but he'd never noticed before-- now he could spot a fellow alcoholic from twenty paces.

He ducked into St. Paul's after work, following a woman in a down jacket and nursing scrubs up a flight of musty stairs towards the sound of voices. It was standing room only in the parish hall. He scanned the room and noted a half-dozen familiar faces, some from this context, some from others. Nearly everyone there was in work clothes.

He set his briefcase down between his feet and leaned on the wall, eyes closed, listening, offering the standard greeting whenever a speaker introduced him or herself. He preferred big meetings, where there was never an expectation he would speak. He didn't feel the need to. Anyone who spoke said what he had to say. Drinking was not unique or complicated.

Winter tended to make him morose, and he was still shaken up by Ray calling a week ago and learning that one of his oldest friends, a man he would die for, had no respect for him at all. He wasn't at the stage anymore where he needed a meeting any time he wanted a drink, but it was a good habit.

The overhead lights on the commuter rail car he took home were out, and he spent the trip sitting in the dark instead of cracking his suitcase open to make another pass over his latest grant proposal like he usually would. It was a welcome reprieve. He watched pinpricks of light from each station pass by and thought about nothing.

His boots slid on the glossy pile of mail that rested on the other side of the door when he unlocked it with cold fingers. He automatically weeded out the coupon booklets, catalogs he'd never subscribed to, and scare mail from someone pretending to be the electric company, dumping the bulk of the pile in the recycling bin. It was loud in his empty house. He liked living out here; sometimes it was so silent he could hear his own heart beating.

He flipped on the kitchen light and paged through the remaining envelopes-- bill, bill, Maryland postmark-- and hit on a thick, textured square with his address printed in spiny longhand on the front. His breath caught. All of the evening's composure flowed out of him instantly.

Because he was an idiot, he opened it. Brad had found a real winner this year. It was the worst card Nate had ever seen. At the bottom, a camel train of wise men proceeded across a glittering, inexplicably blue desert beneath a sky full of doves and a lone, subtly-rendered bald eagle. Shooting through the clouds was a triangular beam of light which illuminated the profile of a white, long-haired adult Jesus wearing a robe and cradling a globe in his hands. _John 3:19_ was rendered in flourishing cursive script at the top.

The text inside declared, 'May the Good Lord hold you warmly in the hollow of his hand; Wishing you Happy Holidays'. Brad had crossed out the word 'Holidays' and written 'Good Christian Handjobs' next to it, which was, Nate had to admit, objectively kind of funny.

He resolved to ignore it. He had changed into his pajamas, brushed his teeth, and was lying in bed trying and failing to get anywhere in _The Brothers Karamazov_ when he threw the book down and reached for his phone.

Brad picked up on the third ring. “Nate?”

“You've got a lot of fucking nerve,” Nate told him.

“I've been told that's one of my best qualities,” Brad said. He sounded cautious. “Is this about the card? I know you found religion, sir, but I didn't realize your sense of humor had been surgically removed in the process of cosmic enlightenment.”

“I got a very interesting phone call last Sunday,” Nate gritted out. “From Ray Person. He had some unexpected insight into my lifestyle that could have only have come from one place.”

“I don't copy.”

“You fucking outed me to Ray fucking Person.” His throat hurt from the effort of not shouting.

Brad scoffed. “I did not.”

“Yeah? Then explain to me, Brad, why your best friend and RTO, a man with whom I have never had a single personal conversation, has information about my private life that I have only ever revealed to you. Who else have you told?”

Brad was quiet for long enough that Nate began to wonder if the call had been dropped, but when he shifted the phone from his ear the timer was still going.

“I never told anyone,” Brad said, finally. “Ray asked me once. About you. It was over a year ago. I told him he was full of shit.”

Nate wanted to believe him. It had hurt too fucking much, sitting with the knowledge that Brad didn't respect him and the things they had shared. Not the way Nate did. That those things didn't weigh on him at all, when they were some of the heaviest decisions Nate carried with him everywhere.

“Nate, I'm sorry. I'll kick his ass for you, if you want. He's overdue for a dozen reasons.”

Nate choked out a laugh and ran his hand over his face. “What the fuck, Brad.”

“Look, if I ever start to understand what goes on in that syphilis-ravaged, whiskey tango head of his, I'll 5150 myself.”

And with that, Nate believed him. It was so recognizably Brad. Brad wouldn't lie to him. He never had, even when it would have been kinder. “Yeah. Uh. How are you?”

“Aside from being rudely awoken at 2300?” He heard fabric shift. Brad shrugging, maybe. But that wasn't right. “I'm adequate.”

“It's 8 o'clock in California,” Nate protested. Despite himself, he still kept a little chart in his head of the time difference the way he had in Oceanside, thinking about what time it was for his family and college friends, when they would wake up and work and eat and go to bed.

“That's correct, sir.” Brad paused for a smug moment, then took pity on him. “I'm at Ft. Benning.”

“Dare I ask?”

“They say fortune favors the daring.”

Nate snorted. “Fine. What are you doing at Ft. Benning? Jumping out of perfectly good airplanes?” He knew damn well that Brad had been wrestled behind a desk over two years ago. The only re-certification training he'd be getting was in paperwork.

“Only for demonstrative purposes.”

It took him a moment. “You're _teaching_ at Ft. Benning?” He wasn't sure which of those was more unbelievable. Of course Brad had always been an excellent team leader, and taught in that capacity, but it was hard to imagine him leading a class, being the center of attention for dozens of people. Despite his reputation and propensity for big talk, he was an introverted and slightly strange individual who did best in small groups or working independently. Nate knew these things-- he had leveraged Brad's unlikely constellation of personality quirks many times in the field, and the last decade did not seem to have changed Brad very much at all.

“For my sins,” Brad drawled, “I have acquired twenty cherry-fresh Army ROTC graduates who want merit badges, one competent Radio Recon operator, and three baby MARSOCs, who have potential but are pitifully outnumbered.”

“That's what you get for making fun of Jesus,” Nate agreed, and ignored the way his stomach felt light when Brad broke into genuine laughter.

“I have some leave coming,” Brad said, and Nate frowned at the non-sequitur until Brad made a snorting noise, and continued, “snd I strongly suspect, sir, that you have considerable vacation time accrued.”

Nate had, in fact, been one of the three people in the office this week. Holidays were slow. But he was the boss. “I'm in the middle of negotiating a grant.”

“So bring your phone. We do have wireless in Georgia, despite what you may have been told.”

“Why do I have to travel?”

“Because it's nineteen fucking degrees in Boston.”

It was fourteen in Acton. He had long since stopped hearing the groans and rattles of his furnace at night. “I--”

“Think about it,” Brad said, a little gruffly. “I'm going to sleep, now.”

“Okay,” Nate said, and laid there with the silence of the ended call in his ear for much longer than he'd meant to, Ray's accusations skittering around the inside of his skull like an animal trapped in the wall.

 


	4. Chapter 4

_January, 2014. Columbus, Georgia  
_

Brad lived in a single-story brick house on a road which was lined on either side by single-story brick houses, each with their own tiny, dead patch of grass demarcated by chain-link and, in some cases, cinder blocks. The units were only differentiated by cloth awnings, the presence of vehicles driven up onto the lawns, and the variety of flags that papered every structure. As the cab drove by, Nate observed displays of pride in all branches of the armed services, several college football teams, prisoners of war, the American Legion, Ireland, and Germany. It was the kind of generic, small-town Americana that Brad professed to hate. Nate could _feel_ eyes on him when he paid the cabbie and lingered outside the gate, staring at Brad's porch. Brad had a big, fuck-off California state flag hanging vertically over one window, two pots full of what looked like dead geraniums, and a tiny moto EGA sticker on the frame of his screen door. Blending in.

He couldn't see the bike, but there was a shed in the back with a padlock on the door. Like anyone who lived on this street would dare to look at Brad's bike funny. He probably kept it out of sight just to avoid instigating any small talk about engines.

The door opened in front of him before he could talk himself into knocking. Brad was wearing a white t-shirt with khaki shorts and held a rag in one hand that smelled pleasantly of Murphy Oil Soap.

He'd gone gray at the temples, but otherwise looked completely unchanged from the platoon photograph that Nate kept on his desk, down to the medium-reg. Nate was overwhelmed with bittersweet recognition, a kind of uncontrollable joy that made him ache everywhere. It was like he'd been storing it up without knowing it, all the happiness he hadn't felt in ten years and all the missing Brad that he hadn't done. He couldn't speak. What was there to say? 'Hello'? 'You look well'?

Brad clapped him on the arm with the hand that wasn't holding the rag. “You're early. Get inside before the neighborhood watch sees you.”

Nate glanced over his shoulder, and saw a Venetian blind in the house across the street shudder. “I'm afraid it's too late for that.”

“God damn it,” Brad grumbled, and led him inside.

The moment the door shut, Nate hugged him properly. Brad tensed for a moment, then relaxed into it, running his free hand over Nate's shoulders. They stayed like that for much longer than was appropriate, Nate's chin tucked over Brad's shoulder, feeling his ribs expand and contract against his arms, his chest.

Nate finally forced himself away, because it didn't seem like Brad was going to. “Not to be an asshole, but I need dinner.”

“You're very demanding,” Brad agreed. “Food this, water that. Next you'll be wanting a place to sleep.” He tipped his head towards an open door behind them, where Nate could see the foot of a made, single bed. “Put your shit away, and we'll order something. I'm almost done the cabinets.”

The guest bedroom (because that was what it was, Brad lived in a _house_ with a _guest bedroom_ ) was large enough to hold the bed, a dresser, two bookshelves that reached to the ceiling and were packed so full the wood warped, and a man-sized vertical niche in the wall with a closet rod jerry-rigged across it, bare metal hangers pushed cleanly to one side. It reminded Nate of his dorm at Dartmouth when he'd first moved into it and had unpacked only what he'd absolutely needed, which had meant three cardboard crates of books and little else.

He put all of his clothing in the top drawer of the dresser, three day's worth of casual wear and some running gear, pausing between trips from his suitcase to inspect the titles Brad had offloaded into the spare room. It was mostly military history, technical manuals for computer networking, and science fiction, although Nate noted what looked like a well-loved section containing English poetry, Shakespeare, and the Greek dramatists. He was considering Brad's apparent preference for Sophocles over Aeschylus when a glossy hardback on the shelf below caught his eye. Unlike everything else, it looked new. He pulled it out with his fingertips gently; Nate treated his own books roughly, but Brad's deserved reverence.

_In Her Majesty's Service: An LGBT History of the Royal Marines_. The spine was stiff when he opened it, although there was a dog-ear visibly squatting about two thirds of the way through the book. There was an inscription on the inside panel beneath the dust cover.

He expected some crude joke from the platoon-- maybe Ray had sent this as a going-away present-- but instead he found, in slightly blotchy blue ink as if from a fountain pen,

_Brad,_

_For old time's sake._

_S.F.,_

_Martin_

He stared down at the name, not sure what he was feeling. There were several ways to interpret that inscription, and all of them led places that were none of his business. But what did it mean for this book to be tucked away in a back room, still looking like new? All of Brad's other tomes on military subjects looked like they had visited the war zones they described. It was hardly conspicuous, but of course Brad didn't make careless mistakes like leaving incriminating messages lying around where guests would see them. Or maybe it wasn't incriminating. Or maybe it was an oversight, and Brad made oversights now that he was nearly forty and didn't give a fuck. What did Nate know about Brad these days, anyway? Jack and shit.

He slid the book back in place gently. By the time Brad stuck his head in, Nate was closing the dresser drawer.

“Bad Chinese or worse Indian?” Brad asked him, gesturing with a handful of paper take-out menus. “You really don't want to risk the pizza.”

The Chinese wasn't that bad. Nate dissected an oily spring roll while Brad caught him up on platoon gossip, nothing especially juicy because Mike tended to keep him well-informed. But it felt much too good to hear some of the stupid little stories: Jacks' kids visiting Pendleton to interview W.M.s for a school project and being adopted by a flock of burly feminist arty mechanics, Shady teaching the POGs at the motor pool Brazilian pop music, Hasser getting his online degree in agricultural management and all the jokes about goat-fucking this produced. Brad was less forthcoming about his students, because, he claimed, they were “an indistinguishable mass of mediocrity without a personality among them”, which was just as well, because Brad wouldn't have to miss any one of them if he managed to pack his chute improperly and perished due to terminal idiocy.

Nate pointed out, around a mouthful of General Tso's, that this might reflect poorly on Brad as an instructor.

“I'm a Marine, sir, not a magician,” Brad said. “Once an officer makes it to jump school, there's no teaching him left from right. You can only pray the knowledge spontaneously arises from his subconscious when it is most needed.”

“Do a lot of praying, do you?” Nate wondered, although what he meant was, _Fuck, I've missed you_.

There was only one bathroom, so he showered and brushed his teeth among Brad's spartan, perfectly-aligned personal care items: disposable BIC razor, aerosol bottle of Gillette, bar of Irish Spring, drugstore-brand 2-in-1 shampoo. It could have all come out of his rucksack in the back of the humvee. Nate scrubbed his hair dry with a forest-green towel and took his dopp kit back to the room with him.

He liberated the most ragged-edged collection of Sophocles from the high shelf and laid down on top of the covers, paging through it idly. Unsurprisingly, Brad had underlined and highlighted vast swathes of the _Ajax_. Nate wondered if he'd ever told Brad that this was the play he wrote his undergraduate thesis on. He couldn't remember. Probably not; it would have seemed like too personal a piece of information. At that time in his life, he'd seen this play very personally. It had felt like it belonged to him, which was the kind of adolescent self-absorption he was perversely grateful that alcoholism had rid him of. Nate had become accustomed to that, how the greatest gifts of adulthood arrived as symptoms of some disaster or folly that at the time seemed eternal and insurmountable.

Ajax's farewell to his son, Teucer, was dog-eared. Nate landed on, “Ah, life is at its sweetest before one has to grapple with pleasure or pain!”, which Brad had underlined twice in pencil, and read on from there.

\-----

 

He woke to a soft tapping and was momentarily disoriented by the unfamiliar ceiling. He sat up, and a paperback slid off of his chest onto the floor.

Brad was leaning in the doorway in woodland MARPAT utilities, cover clutched in his hand. Nate, still hazy from sleep, had the distinct sensation of having traveled through time. He half expected Brad to give him a sitrep on an incoming shamal. Then he remembered that he was in Georgia.

“I have to be on base to release the kindergärtners,” Brad informed him. “I'll be back at 1320. There's a Gold's on Logan; I've left a map and my membership card on the counter if you want to work out. You're on your own with food.”

Nate squinted. “You don't use the base gym?”

“And encounter my students? I'd rather be stretched on a rack.”

Nate blinked blearily at him, and he must have still been half-dreaming, because he could swear that Brad _fidgeted_ , running his thumb in quick, nervous circles around the cloth of the cover. Then he straightened up and about faced. Nate heard a bag being lifted from the floor, and the screen door opening and closing.

He laid back down and stared at the ceiling, wondering what the hell he was going to do with himself for seven and a half hours, and why he was so disappointed to be spending it alone.

\----

 

The decision was made for him, because the only thing open at 6:30 am in the suburbs of Columbus, Georgia was the emergency room, a 24-hour Walgreen's, and Brad's gym.

The teenager at the desk was leaning his chair back on the rearmost feet and stared at him over the top of _Guns & Ammo_ like he couldn't begin to imagine what Nate was doing in the building, especially dressed in basketball shorts and go-fasters and carrying a towel, an iPod, and a water bottle. When Nate presented the membership card, he tipped himself forward far enough that the chair righted itself with a thunk.

“You're not Brad Colbert,” he said, after looking down at the card and up at Nate several times.

Nate restrained himself. “I'm not. He loaned me his card.”

“You know him?” The kid seemed genuinely curious. This wasn't surprising. Brad did exude an aura of mystery. Nate doubted he chit-chatted with the desk guy at the gym, probably just swept in and out like a highly-motivated phantom with correct form on the rower.

“I'm staying at his place,” Nate said, hoping that this would communicate that the gym card had been supplied to him as a guest, like Brad's shower and fridge had been. This did not strike him as a difficult concept to grasp. He wasn't trying to commit grand larceny with the free-weights.

It did not have the desired effect. Disgust twisted the kid's face so suddenly and obviously that Nate looked behind himself on reflex to see if something hideous had appeared in the door. But there was nothing.

“We don't do that here,” the kid said, and flicked the card off the counter so hard it hit Nate in the chest. He was too confused to be pissed about it, just bent to pick it up. “You can either buy a membership or go.”

“Okay,” Nate said, unsettled despite himself. He did not generally provoke rudeness in people, even in Boston where residents prided themselves on being indiscriminate assholes. “Sorry to bother you.”

_Guns & Ammo_ propped itself up in between them again, hiding everything of the boy but his crew cut. The chair creaked.

Nate left and went for a run instead.

\-----

 

He was stopped two separate times trying to get back into Brad's house, once by the woman who lived across the street with the Venetian blinds (Amelia, 38 and pregnant with her third daughter, husband Matt deployed, unloaded her life story onto him while he stood panting on the sidewalk), and then by the mail carrier, who expressed deep suspicion because he'd never delivered a letter to Master Sergeant Colbert from anywhere in New England, not that he read the man's mail, but the exterior of the envelope was fair game, after all, and Nate looked awful young to have been with the Master Sergeant in Iraq, pardon his saying so. Nate endured several minutes of this before he noticed that a third neighbor was idling at the end of the street watching the interrogation, and he explained that he needed a shower before unlocking the front door and retreating inside without the mail. He'd forgotten what the South was like. He'd grown up in Baltimore, but it wasn't South like this. He was used to people minding their own business, and he had assumed that the arrival of a former Marine for a three-day visit with a war buddy would be completely unremarkable to the residents of Knox Ave, the vast majority of whom, as far as Nate could tell, were either employees or dependents of Uncle Sam.

He pulled the shutters down and set himself up to work on his laptop in the kitchen, systematically dealing with the email that had accumulated over twenty-four hours of radio silence. The W-2s still hadn't arrived despite his assistant ordering them in November, Dartmouth wanted him to speak again but had not offered to reimburse him for travel and lodging, an abstract he'd sent out on a whim had been accepted by the conference board at the Peace and Conflict Studies Institute, which meant he had to actually _write_ the thing, and a Veteran's advocacy organization in Tewksbury wanted ISLIC to chip in for a public education campaign but Lindy thought they were too politically enmeshed to touch without pissing off the Democratic half of the board which, she reminded Nate, he did too much of already.

Brad had a Mr. Coffee and a tub of Folger's prominently displayed, but there was nothing in the fridge aside from beer, orange juice, and congealed Chinese, and by the time the sound of the door opening shook him out of his screen-induced flow state, Nate realized that he hadn't eaten anything all day.

Brad dropped his pack and his bike helmet on the couch, shouldering off the same leather jacket that Nate remembered from Oceanside. It was considerably more battered, and had faded around the seams. He hung it along with his blouse on the back of the door and stalked into the kitchen in his PT shirt, which could also have been issued to him in 1999. He was grinning, and stood with his arms folded by the sink, watching Nate close the lid of his laptop like he was waiting for something.

“Kindergärtners sad to see you go?” Nate wondered. “Have you ever left them unsupervised for more than 48 hours?”

“No. They were weeping with joy and terror,” Brad said, “already placing bets on what horrific abuses I'll visit on them upon my return.”

Nate smiled down into his nearly empty mug and swallowed the last, cold inch of coffee. “A healthy amount of terror is character-building. I'm sure you're producing fine paratroopers, Brad.”

“I don't give two shits about character, but jumping out of moving aircraft at thirteen hundred feet is ass-puckeringly frightening,” Brad said, flatly. “You get used to it, or you quit.”

It surprised him. “You find it frightening, still?” It was rare to hear a Marine admit to being scared, although of course he'd seen it in nearly all of his men at one point or another, and felt it himself. It was one of the things men simply knew not to speak about. Acknowledging it was unthinkable, especially in combat.

“Jumping not as much. But every time I dive? Of course I do, sir. I'm not a fucking idiot.” Brad retrieved the card from the counter and tucked it back into his wallet. “Did you lift?”

“They wouldn't let me in,” Nate said. “Thanks, though.”

“They wouldn't _let you in_?” Brad sounded grievously offended on his behalf. Nate almost laughed.

“I went running. It was nicer out anyway. Saw the sights.”

“Who the fuck was on desk that they wouldn't let you in?”

“Some teenager, Brad. Forget about it.” There was no need for Brad to go putting the fear of god into some high schooler trying to make a few bucks. It was probably against gym policy to let him in on Brad's card, anyway.

Brad stilled. “Skinny kid, black hair?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Fuck,” Brad grumbled. “Thought he quit. Little Trombley wannabe.”

At that, Nate laughed. “If he starts torturing cats, you can say something. I think he just wanted to get one over on the Yankee. Let it go.”

Brad's jaw was still tight, so Nate stood up and announced that he was in need of food, and he was going to be very disappointed in Georgia if all Brad had to offer him was worse take-out than he could have gotten in Allston.

“Spoiled civilian,” Brad teased, and Nate watched the tension flow out of him. “Come on, then.”

\-----

 

They walked to a bustling diner with the parking lot half-full of trucks, a yellow linoleum floor, and wood paneling on the walls barely visible beneath a grid of framed reproductions of 1960's movie posters. The booth Brad led them to without consulting anyone had a glass bottle of Heinz ketchup, cafeteria-grade plastic salt and pepper shakers, a stack of Smucker's jam packets, and four different jugs of syrup, boasting flavors from regular to boysenberry.

“Am I in heaven?” Nate wondered, glassing the 8 ½ x 12” paper menu sitting at his place, which was sticky in the margins with thumb-prints in what looked like bar-b-q sauce and contained printed advertisements for local towing and construction companies.

“Elaborate.”

“Biscuits and gravy.”

Brad snorted. “Then I guess you're in heaven. If you ask nicely, Mags will make you grits, too. If you want more gloppy, white, lipid-based foods that can kill you where you sit.”

“I bet they have scrapple,” Nate mused, ignoring him.

“We have RAPA,” rasped the waitress, whom Nate had seen behind the counter when they entered. She was a stout, elderly woman with gun-metal hair coiled tight against her head and yellow, nicotine-stained teeth that she bared at him when he expressed nostalgic excitement for the brand. “He has good taste, Bradley.”

“He's from Maryland,” Brad said, managing to make it sound like, 'he was born congenitally deformed'. “He deserves only your pity.”

“Introduce me, you great nudnik,” she demanded, making a show of stuffing her order pad back into her breast pocket to indicate that it would not be removed until the rituals had been observed.

“ _Margaret_ ,” Brad dragged the syllables out, giving Nate a sideways look, “this is Nate. My old platoon commander. Nate, this is Mags, who feeds me.”

“Honored to meet you, ma'am,” Nate beamed at her, just because he knew it would piss Brad off.

“You Navy boys are so polite,” Mags told Nate, shaking her head. Nate did not correct her and, to his shock, neither did Brad. “What can I get you?”

Nate gorged himself on pig-based items while Brad chewed his “passable” bagel with capers and lox, enduring the too-frequent orbits of Mags by their table with long-suffering bemusement: yes, Nate was staying with him, no, he would not be in town long, yes, of course Brad would take him to see the Civil War Naval Museum.

Nate himself was not exempt from the periodic assault; although he tried to have his mouth full when she swung by on the pretense of refilling his water glass, she'd just hover there until he swallowed. Where did Nate grow up? Baltimore. Where was he living these days? Boston. What did he do? Ran a non-profit. How long had they known each other? Twelve years. Didn't his family miss him on Hanukkah? No. Oh, but wasn't he Jewish, from Baltimore? No, sorry.

When she started in on whether Nate had any “equally attractive” brothers, Nate took a deep gulp of water to avoid choking, and Brad said, his face uncharacteristically pink, “the checks, please, Mags.”

To Nate's annoyance, only one slip of paper arrived, and he offered to go up to the register and ask them to split it. He only had twenties in his wallet and his meal had cost considerably more than Brad's.

“Guests can shut the fuck up,” Brad told him, and handed his card off to Mags without ceremony. “If I so much as let you pay the tip I'd never hear the end of it.”

“Trust you to move to the deep south and find the one Jewish grandmother,” Nate said as they walked back to Brad's place, falling easily into single-file along the stretches of road with no sidewalks.

“The price was indeed high, but I have most of her recipes.” Brad angled himself oddly as a truck blew by them, like he was reflexively shielding Nate from the road. “Just waiting on the rugelach.”

“A dedicated recon operation. How many daughters and grand-nieces has she tried to set you up with?”

“Zero.”

“I'm shocked.”

“She's shown my driver's license photo to four nephews from New York to Toronto, but as of yet none of them have arrived to claim me,” Brad deadpanned, and went a few more yards down the shoulder before he turned, staring at where Nate had stopped cold. “That fried offal caught up with you already, sir? Come on. Daylight's wasting.”

“But--” Nate managed, completely thrown. The last two days were re-aligning themselves, and every few seconds another strange interaction he hadn't thought twice of re-visited him in this impossible context. The neighbors accosting him with more than the usual degree of small-town nosiness. The 'Trombley wannabe' at the gym. _Semper Fi,_ _Martin_ stored precisely at eye level, because the Iceman didn't make mistakes. He opened his mouth to demand something, he didn't know what, maybe 'when were you going to tell me?' or 'why did you let her think that?', but what came out was, “But it's _Georgia!_ ”

Brad's lip curled up. “Observant as always, sir.”

Nate bit his lip, swallowed down 'fuck you', and 'what the fuck', among other, even less articulate utterances. Brad turned around and paced back towards him slowly, like he was being careful. He stopped a few feet away.

“Come on, Nate,” he said, smiling almost softly. “No panic attacks on the side of the road. That's what you delicate New England Protestant types have, right? 'Panic attacks'?”

\-----

 

“Mags thinks you're gay,” Nate said when the screen door finally closed behind them. “The entire town thinks you're gay.”

Brad proceeded into the kitchen and retrieved two glasses from a high cabinet. Nate braced himself for the 'I don't drink really means I don't drink' conversation, but all that landed in front of him was orange juice. Pulpy. He'd heard the rant from Brad more than once over the years, how non-pulp orange juice was an abomination to God and the only excuse for drinking it was a fatal allergy to fiber.

Brad shut the fridge door and said, “When I moved here two years ago, I was seeing someone male. So everyone assumed.”

“And you never corrected them?”

Brad pulled one of his chairs out from the table and sat on it backwards, legs on either side of the back as he sipped his juice. “There's nothing to correct. I prefer men. It's semantics.”

“And your--” Nate waved in the general direction of Fort Benning. “Your job.”

“It turns out,” Brad drawled, “that as long as I don't fuck any of my students, both the Army and the Corps are legally prohibited from caring where I stick my dick. I believe the phrase is 'Thanks, Obama'.”

“Brad.” He knew that wasn't what Nate had meant. Passing a law, or repealing one, didn't change a culture.

Brad shrugged. “Where there have been issues, I dealt with them on an individual basis. It helps that I scare the piss out of all the Army boys just by being alive. They think BRC turns you into Batman.”

“I mostly remember being wet, tired, and cold,” Nate said. “And never using any of it.”

“We have amazing PR,” Brad said, meaning, presumably, Recon. “I have no fucking idea how, given the company we keep.”

“No one told me.” Nate stared at the glass of orange juice in front of him, still untouched. “You didn't tell me.”

“You didn't ask.” Brad reached across the table and shoved the glass towards him. Nate drank obediently. It was good stuff, not concentrated. Reminded him of California, where fresh fruit was falling off of the trees. “And I'm never sure of where the knitting circle sits; they're all so unspeakably retarded. I had to come out to Ray eight times before he believed me. Pretty sure half of Bravo still thinks it's a joke.”

Nate swallowed. “ _Eight_ times?”

“I counted,” Brad confirmed, sounding almost proud about it-- of himself or Ray, Nate had no idea. “Of course, now the cross-eyed little bastard talks like he knew all along and I never fooled him. He likes to imagine that he's perceptive.”

Nate stared at the woodgrain of the tabletop and the damp ring of condensation the glass had left. It was easier than looking at Brad, who was lounging six feet away like an open minefield, just waiting for Nate to step somewhere, anywhere. “What happened with the man you were seeing?”

“It ended, obviously.”

Nate glanced up at him. “You don't seem broken up about it.”

“It was casual.”

“So why even bring it up?” Why flaunt it around town? What good did that do?

“Because it's my life, Nate,” Brad said. “I'm a private citizen with friends and neighbors and two nosy sisters, and I vote and pay taxes like anyone else and I'm no longer legally fucking mandated to sustain a web of lies about myself for the sake of Joe Evangelical's precious feelings.”

“It would be easier with women.”

Brad scoffed. “At the risk of children and in-laws? ”

“Oh, fuck off,” Nate snapped. “You want kids. You want to get married and raise little jet-skiing hellions when you retire, everyone knows it. No one complains that much about marriage. You wanted it like hell.” He hadn't realized until he said it, but he'd _wanted_ that for Brad, even if the image brought a tight little curl of bitterness to his stomach. Nate had always pictured it for him: something real, and reliable. Not 'for old time's sake'. Not 'casual'. Brad deserved better than that. “You told me it had happened to you twice. Twice in thirty years. That's nothing, Brad. That's a statistical blip.”

Brad leaned back a little, watching him with attentive, Iceman coolness. The silence stretched, and in it, Nate became ashamed of his outburst. Brad's decisions were none of his business, and Nate's precious feelings about his life had no more validity than “Joe Evangelical”s.

He pushed his chair back to stand, but Brad's hand shot out and touched him lightly on the wrist. Nate hovered there, legs tensed, heart pounding.

“I met Allie in sixth grade,” Brad said, slowly, like he was unsure whether he wanted to be speaking, “And it was like I finally got my government-issued Babelfish. Before that, no one made sense. I didn't speak the same language they did, and I was sick of trying to make myself understood.”

Nate sat back down. Brad's arm withdrew; his hand settled, curled slightly, on the table.

“It was fucking ridiculous, because I had the most trouble with girls, even my sisters. But we got each other without talking most of the time. I thought that meant we could hack it long-term. We never fought. I knew when she was angry anyway. And sad. I always knew.

“The cheating surprised the shit out of me, because Daniel-- we were all friends, but he thought Allie and I were fucking weirdos. Even after we broke up, she's still like that-- knows what I'm saying, what I mean by things. Like we're the same species.”

Nate licked his lip. Brad's thumb circled the tabletop once, that same fidget. It was a tell, and he was letting Nate see it.

“ _That's_ only happened twice,” Brad said, staring him down, daring him.

_Ten fucking years_ , Nate thought, and felt his fists clench until his nails dug into his palms. There was nothing to say and nowhere to run to. Not a single distraction or an excuse, at 3:00 pm on a Friday in Brad's average little kitchen in suburban Georgia, with the yellow shades and the white counter and, more importantly, Brad in it, huge and deadly like always, devastatingly frank in his little wooden chair.

He'd never lied to Nate. Not even by omission.

And Nate had never had an excuse. He'd never let himself _think_ far enough to need excuses. It wasn't useful to want something impossible, so he'd packed it away-- drank it away, when packing hadn't worked.

And for what?

“That's how it is for me, Nate.” Brad stood up, retrieved both of their glasses, and placed them gently in the sink. “I don't know about you.”

Nate thought about night dives, and jumping out of airplanes, and directing traffic under fire. “I don't know about me either,” he admitted.

Brad smiled at him, and Nate felt it _just_ like he remembered, a perfect fossil crystallized in amber, that thing that passed between them underneath the words, the glances. “Yeah. I know. You should think about it.”


	5. Chapter 5

_January, 2014. Boston, Massachusetts._

His flight had been delayed, and by the time they reached Logan it was 0200 and the T wasn't running. The moment he stepped out of the plane he turned his phone back on, finger hovering over the call he'd decided to make four hours ago while they sat in the runway, waiting in traffic to take off.

Families with children and grim-looking college students flowed around him towards the exits and what was likely a limited supply of taxis. He was exhausted and frustrated and wired and he'd had the conversation over ten times in his own mind, which was stupid because it was impossible to predict what someone else would say, especially when that someone was Ray Person. All of those imagined dialogues felt silly and far away now that he was back in Boston instead of in the strange, in-between place of a grounded airplane, waiting for his normal life to resume.

He had stopped, and everything seemed impossible from a standstill. He pressed 'Call' before he could change his mind.

“Ash and Josh's House of Red Bull and Necromancy,” said a perky female voice. “How can we raise your spirits today?”

Nate realized he was staring directly at the white neon cup-shaped sign of a Dunkin' Donuts, and wondered if he had fallen asleep on his feet. “...Hi. Ray Person called me from this number. Is he available?”

“That depends. Are you having an extramarital affair with him?”

“I-- no.”

“Darn. You sound cute. What do you want him for?”

“This is Nate Fick. We were in the Corps together.”

“Oh, you.” She laughed. “Yeah, hold on. I'll get him.” He heard feet pounding on stairs and realized, belatedly, that this must be the wife. The rocket scientist. He'd had six years to process this information but had not gotten around to it. “Poobah! Your CO is on the phone!”

“'Poobah'?” Nate asked when Ray finally picked up, after what sounded suspiciously like Ashley licking him.

“At least spellcheck doesn't correct my name to 'Fuck',” Ray returned. “Evening, sir. How's New England?”

“Frigid,” Nate said. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You just did.”

“I'd appreciate it if you were honest.”

“Your lack of trust wounds me, sir,” Ray said, not sounded wounded in the slightest. “But go ahead, roll the magic Ray-Ray 8-ball.”

“How did you find out that--” he closed his eyes, forced it out. “That I'm gay?”

He could hear his own pulse hammering against the silence of the line. He was _profoundly_ aware that he was in public, although the gate was empty and the nearest other human being was a janitor twenty yards away mopping the entrance to the men's.

“Well, technically,” Ray said, after an excruciating moment, sounding almost as pole-axed as Nate, “the Reporter told me.”

“The _Reporter_?”

“Evan, you know, Rolling Stone?”

“Yes, Ray, I know who he is.”

“Oh, you want to know _what_ he told me,” Ray gasped, and Nate rubbed at his eyes, too tired to say anything about how Ray was kind of an asshole, actually. “That's a totally different question. But because we have shed blood and ball sweat together, I'll tell you that one for free.

“So I'm chilling in the hot tub at this sweet-ass mansion in LA, full of microbrews and portabella mushroom burger, talking with the reporter in a totally not homosexual way about our new Commander in Chief and the implications of the upcoming liberal reign of terror. And you know how the reporter's a gullible pinko dicksuck but we all love him anyway? He says to me he's betting Obama will repeal DADT before the end of 2009. Like, homes. Really.

“But Reporter is serious! And he looks to his left and to his right, and there's nobody there but his good pal Ray-Ray, and this motherfucker leans in and tells me he'll be so happy for Brad and Captain Fick, because it was _unfair_ that Marines of that caliber had to fear dishonorable discharge just for living their lives.

“Now, because I am a gentleman and a scholar, I did not punch him in the mouth,” Ray continued, “but I did ask him what the fuck his delusional gay-porn-obsessed ass was talking about, and also if he was on any hard drugs, which he denied. And this motherfucker swears to me, on his integrity as a journalist, that he saw Sergeant Colbert and then-Lieutenant Fick locking lips at the POG camp the night before we entered Baghdad. Full-on tongue, homes.”

Nate stepped into the nearest chair and sat down. “He told you that.”

“In glorious, yellow, muckraking detail,” Ray confirmed. “No interrupting, Fick.

“Anyway. I fly home with my lovely fiancée and live in hetero bliss convinced the hot tub incident is a canapé-induced fever dream until 2011, when Brad calls me and tells me he's a giant homo, which I totally knew already because of his _everything_ , but apparently in addition to being a total homo, he also fucks dudes. Which was news, although not the kind of news I needed directly in my ear on a Friday evening when I was planning a romantic night of spaghetti, _Alien vs. Predator_ , and blow jobs, but you know. Bros before lawfully wedded life partners of the opposite sex, and Ash fucking loves this kind of drama.

“Now I don't actually care if you and Brad did the dirty in Iraq, sir, because combat is a strange place and I am obligated by the BFF code to congratulate Brad whenever he succeeds in sticking his dick in a consenting adult. However, and I don't know if you know this, but Brad was an absolute nightmare for literal years after OIF. He fucking fled the country to hide under a Humvee in _Britain_ , homes. He was a surly-ass princess and a pain in my ass specifically for the duration of my dating Ash and our engagement and the _whole time_ I thought it was because he was all broken up about his dumb middle-school girlfriend and not getting married which, it is pretty great, homes, but I wasn _'_ t so obnoxious about it that he had to _cross the Atlantic_.

“And this remains a complete fucking Ancient Aliens mystery to me until Brad shows up at my EAS Anniversary Party-slash-Birthday-Bash last year with a fucking _clone of you_ on his arm, looking like a diet misery sandwich instead of the McDouble, so I can't even give him shit about it because I'm finally not worried that he's going to slit his wrists in our tub if I leave him alone for five minutes.

“Now homes, I'm not a complete retard even if I play one on T.V., so I assemble all of this information and add to it one ginger Royal Marine Lieutenant with a law degree and a dicksucking mouth, solve for 'X', and presto! Reporter was not having a stress-induced hallucination, the moon landing was faked, and you broke Brad's gay little heart so hard he'd settle for your British Evil Twin. Ergo, you are gay.”

“They broke up,” Nate said, latching onto the one part of that he had some familiarity with. “Brad and the Brit, I mean.”

“Uh, duh,” Ray scoffed. “Bradley only has two speeds: casual fucking of people who actually like him, or pining for decades over people who have already left. Personally, I think he's got abandonment issues around his adoption.”

“He seems okay,” Nate said, still reeling. Ray had an unusual way of putting things, and the entire narrative was twisting and surreal, but he didn't doubt a word of it. _No one_ knew Brad like Ray Person did. “He seems happy.”

“Wait. Where _are_ you?”

“Boston.” Nate closed his eyes. “I was in Georgia this morning.”

If it were any other situation, Nate thought, he'd be proud of himself for managing to stun Ray Person into silence. “Thanks, Ray. I--”

“Respectfully, sir,” Ray said, all of his earlier humor evaporated, “he _is_ okay. He is as happy as I've seen him since OIF. If you fuck him up again, I'm going to come to your house and break all of your extremities with a bat.”

“Solid copy,” Nate said. “Thank you, Ray. Good to talk to you.”

“You too,” Ray said, rather grudgingly. “Take care of yourself, sir.” He hung up.

Nate stared down at the phone, completely overwhelmed. The sane thing to do, the _sober_ thing to do would be to take a cab home, brush his teeth, get a night's sleep, and resume his everyday life as usual. He could ruminate on this later. Maybe on his commute in he could make a list of pros and cons, what the benefits and costs would be to confronting Brad about this, and what they would be for keeping his head down and minding his own business. He had laundry to do, and an office of people waiting for him to return, and a conference paper to write.

But he didn't _want_ to do any of that. Didn't that matter? Wasn't he _allowed_ to let that matter?

 _Make a decision_ , he told himself, one fist clenched against his knee.

He gave himself exactly ten seconds. Then he stood up and walked the length of gate A, out through security, to the JetBlue ticket desk. It was closed. He found a bench across from it and laid down.

 

* * *

 

_January, 2014. Columbus, Georgia._

Brad was in his dead-grass-slash-gravel postage-stamp sized backyard when Nate turned onto Knox Ave, which completely spoiled his plans of knocking dramatically on the door. It was also sixty-seven degrees, and he was dripping sweat in his stale flannel shirt from jogging with his bag from the bus stop.

He stopped outside the wire fence, watching Brad tighten a bolt on his bike, which was modern and jet- black and hulking and more like what Nate had initially imagined a Marine would own. He was shirtless and had various hand tools sticking out of his pockets and belt loops. The tattoo had aged, bled into indistinct smears in some places and faded in others. There was an arc of peeling, sunburnt skin over his upper shoulders and the back of his neck.

He was beautiful. Nate gripped the metal finial of the fence post and watched him rub his greasy hands over his jeans, watched the muscles of his back flex, the sun shining in his buzzed hair. He could be allowed to see this all the time, he marveled. He could see this, and not have to look away.

His hand slipped down the fence, caught on the catch of the gate with a faint 'clink'. Brad looked up, face blank.

"Déjà vu,” he said.

“Yesterday,” Nate corrected.

Brad shook his head. “Iraq. What happened, sir? Forget your toothbrush?”

“I bought one at Logan, actually,” Nate said. He'd shaved in the men's, too, waiting for the first flight out and jittery with too much coffee. He was sleep-deprived and hungry and wearing the same clothes he had when he'd left, but he was moving. It was easier than he'd ever expected, to walk to where Brad was and reach out a hand. It was only a little bit like jumping out of a plane, or log PT, or dancing on shells. Didn't feel anything at all like cinder blocks on the stairs. “I decided to stop being a pussy.”

Brad's mouth twitched. He gripped Nate's hand and hauled himself up, leaving a smear of black grease on Nate's cuff. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Nate said, clenching his fingers tightly around Brad's as he made to pull away.

Brad watched him with that peculiar mixture he had of calm and caution. His thumb brushed Nate's knuckle. The warmth of his skin made Nate's gut drop out before he caught himself and remembered to breathe. Brad wasn't saying anything. For the first time since he'd left for the airport he wondered if Brad's offer had an expiration date; if it had even been a offer at all.

Cool fingertips touched the side of his face, trembled over the shell of his ear. “Come inside,” Brad said.

\-----

 

The familiar layout of Brad's home felt newly hostile-- Nate had left and come back on his own recognizance. He was no longer a guest.

He lingered in the hallway as Brad rid himself of the bike grease in the kitchen sink, running a bar of Lava soap up his arms as if Nate weren't there. The door to the master bedroom was open, unlike in days prior. Nate could see the colorful heels of two surf boards mounted on the wall and the foot of an impeccably made Queen-sized bed.

The tap shut off. Brad dried himself with a dishrag, and turned to Nate. “You want a shower?”

He could probably use one. “Not especially.”

“Have you slept?”

“I caught an hour at the airport.”

He could tell Brad was considering this information carefully, remembered Brad's constant regard in-country to the physical well-being of the men in his truck. Nate doubted that attention to detail had changed now that he was responsible for even more boots.

“I'm not one of your ducklings,” he said. “I know what I'm doing, here.”

Brad's mouth skewed sideways, something soft in his face that made Nate shiver. “No you don't.” He stepped closer, leaving the towel draped over a drawer pull, stopping mere inches from Nate. Nate tilted his head up to meet his eyes. “But it's all right. Despite what you seem to believe, you don't have to do everything by yourself.”

Nate leaned forward until their mouths met and the top of his chest settled against Brad's. He kissed Brad lightly, carefully, and with genuine curiosity; it was not something he'd ever spent much time doing, especially sober. He curled his tongue behind Brad's teeth, breathed his air. Every slick motion sent warmth cascading through him from his head down through his fingers and toes.

Brad's big hands crept up his back, stroking over his shoulders and down his arms until finally settling on his wrists. Then Brad choked out a little sound against Nate's tongue where it darted over his palate and Nate was off-balance, yanked hard against Brad's body as Brad sealed them together tightly. A fist curled against Nate's spine, clutching the fabric of his shirt; Brad's palm cupped the back of his head and tilted Nate just slightly and he wasn't kissing Brad anymore, he was being _devoured_. His toes curled in his go-fasters. He felt himself hardening against Brad's dick, a feedback loop of excitement and heat that pulled him taught until he was rolling his hips against Brad's thigh unthinkingly. It was so easy. It was so _strange_ to let it be easy, to stop stopping himself. He fumbled a hand between them and cupped his palm around the bulge of Brad's dick, head spinning.

When Brad pushed them apart, gasping, the air in the kitchen felt cold. Nate stared dumbly at his face. Brad looked unlike Nate had ever seen him; cheeks full and healthy instead of drawn and shallow, his mouth wet. He had lines etched around his eyes and into his brow that had appeared when Nate wasn't looking. The eyes were the same, though-- pale and bright and possessed of a piercing attention, an intelligence that didn't just see Nate but sought him out, caught him and demanded things of him that no one else had ever dared. Had ever _known_ to dare.

“I missed you,” Nate confessed. “I always miss you.”

Brad leaned in and kissed him once more, softly. “Shower and nap,” he ordered between gentle, damp brushes of lip and scrapes of teeth. “And call your office.”

Nate jerked with disbelieving laughter, hooking his fingers into Brad's belt loops and grinding into him. “Oh, fuck off.”

Brad shook his head and stepped away far enough that he could reach down and adjust himself without brushing Nate. “I want your full attention, Nate. Do your due diligence.”

Nate stared at him. Brad stared right back. He kept staring until Nate gave in and fished his phone out of his left front pocket, trying to ignore where his cock was uncomfortably tenting his jeans, and flipped it open. He dialed without looking. If Lindy ever learned she was on Nate's speed dial between Poison Control and Nate's mother, he would never hear the end of it.

“Nate,” she said, immediately upon picking up. “I was getting ready to write your eulogy.”

Nate glanced at the clock on Brad's stove and was shocked to discover they'd been making out for over ten minutes. It was past 9:30. “Hey. I'm not coming in today.”

“Oh God. I was kidding. Did someone actually die?”

“No. I'm extending my vacation.” Silence. “Lindy?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I'm having trouble hearing you over all of these flying pigs. They're very alarmed.”

Brad smirked at him, but didn't break eye contact. Nate bit his lips together.

“Can you-- there's a draft of the VAOT proposal in my Dropbox, would you get it to Elise? And do you feel comfortable handling tomorrow's 1pm by yourself? I think if you emphasize to them--”

“Nate,” Lindy laughed. “Stop micromanaging. We will be fine. Take the week.”

“I can't take a _week_ ,” Nate scoffed.

“You sure can. In fact, I'm going to have Marcus revoke your building access until Monday.”

Nate closed his eyes briefly. Brad's smirk had blossomed into a full-force, shit-eating grin. “Lindy--”

“He's doing it right now,” she announced cheerfully. “I guess if you were really desperate, you could leave your license at the desk and get a guest pass, but then I'd have to yell at you. Likewise if you ninja your way in here with Marine parkour or whatever. Don't make me yell, Nate. It's bad for my blood pressure.”

“Thank you,” Nate said, quietly.

“You are most welcome.”

He hung up and tucked the phone back into his pocket.

“Who was that?” Brad asked.

“My co-founder.”

“I like her.”

Nate smiled. “You would. She'd like you, too.” He licked his lips. “You know, I have fucked men before. You're not going to spook me.”

He didn't understand what he saw in the minute shake of Brad's head, but it wasn't malicious. If it was sadness, it was small and quiet. “You know where the towels are,” Brad said.

He didn't touch Nate as he walked past him. Nate heard the screen door whine open and then rattle shut. Boots crunched on gravel. Someone shouted a greeting at Brad from the road over the sound of an engine, and he said something back. Swifts chattered in the trees.

Nate smiled wryly at the empty kitchen. He was fucking _exhausted_.

\-----

He woke to mid-day sun on his face and Brad's obnoxiously comfortable mattress dipping behind him. An arm curled itself around his waist.

“Stow it,” he mumbled preemptively. He could not help grinning into the pillow beneath his cheek. He liked this room, this bed. It smelled like Brad and sunlight. Like the opposite of loneliness.

Brad's smile unfurled against his bare shoulder, a press of cold nose and teeth. “Good kip, sir? Accommodations to your liking?”

Nate ignored the needling. “What time is it?”

“1440.” Brad stretched out behind him; everywhere they touched was cool and bare. Nate tried to turn over, but Brad held him fast. “It's a nice day. Wanna go for a hike?”

A long, naked thigh slid between Nate's; he bit his lip. Fuck. “You're punishing me, aren't you?”

“Hmm.” Brad's hands traveled over his chest and sides, batting away Nate's own exploratory ventures. “I thought about being a cocktease for ten years, but that seemed like cutting off my balls to spite my dick.”

At that, Nate broke out of the hold forcibly and rolled over, not sure if or how he meant to defend himself, but needing to look Brad in the face. He knew he had no right to be hurt. But it _hurt_.

But Brad's eyes were laughing. He looked happy. He cupped Nate's cheek in one hand and the pad of his thumb smoothed in a gentle arc beneath Nate's eye.

“Never seen you without these shadows,” Brad murmured. “I'd like to.”

Nate swallowed. “I don't want to go for a hike,” he said.

“No?” Brad teased.

“No.” He turned his head out from under Brad's touch to kiss his palm. “I want to taste every inch of your skin.”

He felt Brad shudder against him. “You're all talk,” Brad dared, and grunted when Nate tackled him.

\-----

Exploring Brad was a revelation. Nate hadn't realized the questions his own body had been carrying around ever since the tall grass in a field outside Baghdad had scraped Brad's bare sides. Brad was long everywhere. He had very few scars for someone who had spent his life out of doors and in close proximity to danger, although a ripple of too-smooth skin across his right hip and a few small knots of tissue from shrapnel attested to the IED incident. What had once been spare, lean muscle along his abdomen was softened by age and a civilized lifestyle; Nate didn't miss how stripped down Brad had looked in Iraq, and presumably Afghanistan after that.

He was silent and still as Nate kissed down his chest and stomach, but twitched and huffed when touched behind the knees or kissed on the neck. Ticklish. Nate filed the information away with awe and delight.

There was nothing exceptional about his dick, except for the fact that it was attached to him. Nate fondled and stroked him to full hardness easily, enjoying how Brad's hips twitched up towards his hand. When he licked his own palm to slick it, Brad groaned. When Nate bent to take him in his mouth, he slammed one fist down onto the mattress and grabbed Nate's shoulder with the other, squeezing. Nate bobbed his head and sank low, regulating his breathing. This was something he knew how to do; blow jobs had been the activity of choice in the brief, impersonal encounters that constituted his experience with men. The act had a mechanical familiarity-- the strangest bit was doing it in a bed, lying down. He rolled Brad's balls in his still-damp palm and hummed.

Brad's hand cupped the back of his head. “Enough,” he gritted.

Nate pulled off, giving him a long, slow suck along the way. “Hmm?”

Brad was staring at him, his mouth just slightly open. Nate noted the sweat slicking his chest, the redness of his face. He looked _undone_.

He had a drawer of letters from Brad at home, years of them. Alone they seemed like meager things: a postcard from Kabul with a sarcastic, ' _Wish You Were Here_ ' scrawled on the back, a sheet of notebook paper containing a treatise on the chow situation at Camp Leatherneck, six uniquely terrible Christmas cards. Brad had called him a total of three times between 2008 and 2013. The most talking they did was when they happened to both make it to the same Bravo-2 reunion party, in which case Brad sought him out so they could argue good-naturedly about literature and the validity of a single-payer model for health insurance. To an outsider, these were the efforts of an old war buddy to fulfill a minimal social obligation. It was all very above-board.

Nate licked his lips, tasted Brad on them. He allowed himself to admit that the letters, the phone calls, and the bump of Brad's shoulder against his as they stood on Poke's lawn were not Brad doing the bare minimum to maintain a trans-continental friendship. They were the moments when Brad had been weak.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered.

Brad regarded him warily. “What for?”

“I talked to Ray,” Nate said. “He said that--”

“Ray Person is 99% full of shit,” Brad rasped, but Nate saw his jaw tighten, the tendon in his throat twitch.

“I'm sorry,” Nate repeated. “I didn't know.”

Brad sat up underneath him, forcing Nate back onto his knees. His gaze was as sharp and focused as Nate had ever seen it. The Iceman on a mission.

“I thought it was just me,” Nate said.

“Lie down,” Brad told him.

\-----

Nate was in reasonably safe territory, self-composed and all squared away, up until the point Brad pushed his legs up against his chest and slid inside of him. For what felt like a full minute, Nate couldn't breathe. Brad's weight on him was too heavy, he was too big inside of Nate; he was equal parts crushed inside of something and split apart by that same thing, Brad was everywhere on him and in him and it was too much. He felt his nails bite into Brad's arms, but he couldn't stop his toes and fingers from curling in the way his entire body was curled in, bent double between Brad and Brad's bed.

Brad leaned down and pressed their foreheads together, his breathing slow and intentional. Nate could feel it in his entire body. He inhaled and exhaled in time. Brad kissed his chin, his nose, his cheek. His hands slipped from Nate's legs to his face and cradled it, held him in place as Brad fucked Nate's mouth open with his tongue, breathing directly into him. And then Brad was moving, hips rolling against him again and again, cock stroking in and out of him, huge and inexorable, everything he hadn't permitted himself to want from the first moment Sergeant Brad Colbert had shared a silence with him at Camp Pendleton.

There was nothing weak in the way Brad fucked him. It wasn't giving in. Giving in would be looking away from the gaze that had him pinned as surely as Brad's body did. He didn't. Sweat stung his eyes as Brad moved in him, a sensation strange and wonderful. He clasped the back of Brad's neck and held them together, held on as Brad fucked him to an orgasm that felt anything but perfunctory and cheap.

“You,” Brad said, between deep kisses that left Nate light-headed with their sheer hunger. “You.”

It scared the hell out of him, but Brad was here. He held tighter.

\-----

 

“I don't know how this works,” Nate admitted.

They were lying side by side on the bed, only their shoulders touching. Brad had propped his head up on the one pillow that hadn't been hurled to the floor in their fumbling. He had his eyes closed and was wearing a smile that Nate could only discern by virtue of proximity and experience.

Nate was indulging himself in tracing Brad's profile over and over with his eyes, watching how it was transformed by the light from the window: sweaty skin was washed white, fine hairs glowed gold. The dappled shadows of leaves and clouds, compelled by the wind, moved over him like he was a landscape in himself.

“Well sir, in my admittedly limited experience, you sit back and let it work itself.” Brad didn't open his eyes, but his eyebrows crept up and his lashes fluttered, catching the light. “But if you really need an OPLAN: we see each other when we can. We talk. Eventually I'll succeed in convincing you to abandon that Siberian gulag you call a Commonwealth and move in with me.”

Nate laughed, both startled by the sheer cheek and amused with himself-- had he really forgotten what Brad was like? “Oh, is that how it is?”

“Maybe go back to California,” Brad's smile morphed into a sharp grin, the one that was more a baring of teeth than anything else. “I'll consider alternate proposals on a case-by-case basis.”

“How magnanimous of you.”

The eye nearest to him opened, nearly all pupil. Nate watched it contract. Brad's irises were so fucking blue, like the shadows of a glacial crevasse. Nate could fall in, if he wasn't careful.

He was done with careful.

“I used to have these combat dreams,” Nate said, “when I first got out. Nightmares. You were captured or lost.”

Brad blinked slowly at him.

“But you weren't lost.” Nate swallowed. “You were right here. The whole time, you were right here.”

“Is the self-flagellation something they teach you in AA, or did it come standard?” Brad wondered, and rolled onto his side, facing Nate. “I don't know what Person told you, but I haven't been rending my garments in your absence.”

“No?”

Brad shrugged. “Only a little. I had some of my own issues to work out.”

Nate smiled sadly. “Yeah?”

“For every thing there is a season, sir,” Brad deadpanned, although his eyes were serious. “You've stopped drinking.” His hand settled on Nate's stomach. “I'm done with deployments. Our logistical situation is vastly improved.”

“We could have--”

“You couldn't have. This is a joint operation, sir. Your full and enthusiastic co-operation is paramount.”

Nate shook his head. “It can't possibly be that easy.”

Brad leaned in to kiss him. “Won't always be. So do me a favor, and let it be easy when it is.”

Nate kissed back. “You've mellowed,” he accused.

“I had to pass a psych evaluation before they let me near the Army boys,” Brad said, and laughed when Nate drew back in indignation. “I'm kidding.”

Nate huffed and tucked his face into Brad's neck.

“Besides,” Brad said, tracing his hand up and down Nate's spine. Nate felt his voice more than heard it. “I'm not blameless in this. I forgot one of the core tenets of soldiery, which has been passed down from enlisted to enlisted since time immemorial.”

“What's that?” Nate wondered, already smiling in anticipation of Brad's uniquely infuriating wit.

Brad nipped at his ear and groped his ass. “Officers can only be led from the rear.”


End file.
